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Curiosity—the intrinsic desire to know—is a concept central to the human mind and knowledge acquisition. Experimental studies on information-seeking have found that curiosity facilitates memory encoding and exhibits similar rewarding properties as extrinsic rewards/incentives, by eliciting a dopaminergic response in the reward network. However, it is not clear whether these findings hold with more naturalistic dynamic stimuli and how the joint effect of curiosity and extrinsic incentive manifests in learning and neural activation patterns. Herein, we presented participants with videos of magic tricks across two behavioural (N₁ = 77, N₂ = 78) and one fMRI study (N = 50) and asked them to rate subjective feelings of curiosity, while also performing a judgement task that was incentivised for the …