Reinforcement learning has a pretty useful framework for thinking about this called the exploration-exploitation dilemma.

In order for an agent to fully exploit it's environment it first has to explore that environment, and this is where curiosity becomes useful. In fact, last year there was a paper that tried to introduce curiosity to RL-based learning models [1]

I suspect some sort of cross-pollination of these two areas of research would be useful.

[1] https://www.google.com/url?q=https://arxiv.org/pdf/1705.0536...