Psychology Of Curiosity Research Paper

Positioned at the crossroads of cognition and emotion motivation, curiosity is not only of practical importance but of theoretical interest. As Malone (1981, p. 363) notes, curiosity ‘is evoked by the prospect of modifying higher level cognitive structures … [and] … can be thought of as a desire to bring better ‘‘form’’ to one’s knowledge structures.’ Hebb (1955) and Nissen (1954) both argued that curiosity is a manifestation of the brain’s natural tendency toward cognitive processing. According to Nissen (1954, p. 300), ‘the requirements of all tissues is that they perform their normal functions … It is positively painful to deny any organ the exercise of its usual function … It is the function of the brain to perceive and to know.’

Research on curiosity has been stymied by divergent interpretations of the concept. Perhaps the most important demarcation lies between ‘specific’ and ‘diversive’ curiosity (Berlyne 1960). Specific curiosity refers to the desire for specific information, as exemplified by one’s desire to know the perpetrator in the Jon Benet Ramsey case. Diversive curiosity refers to unfocused exploratory behavior as exemplified by a rat’s initial exploration of a new cage. In addition to the different types of curiosity, researchers have examined curiosity-like motives without clearly speci-fying their relationship to curiosity. For example, the ‘need for cognition’ (Cohen et al. 1955) is defined as ‘a need to … to understand and make reasonable the experiential world.’ Likewise, research on ‘interest’ seeks to understand what particular topics people find interesting and why.

1. Two Waves Of Curiosity Research

Curiosity research has unfolded in two waves. The first peaked around 1960 and addressed the question of curiosity’s underlying cause. The second, which peaked in the late 1970s but continues into the early twenty-first century, has focused on the problem of measuring curiosity.

1.1 The Underlying Cause Of Curiosity

One early account of curiosity, articulated by William James, then extended by McDougall, viewed curiosity as closely related to fear, in the sense that both are produced by similar stimuli. To illustrate the close connection between curiosity and fear, James cited the behavior of an alligator he had observed swimming toward a man seated on the beach, ‘gradually drawing near as long as he kept still, [but] frantically careering back as soon as he made a movement’ (James 1950. An alternative perspective proposed by Freud characteristically viewed curiosity as derivative of the sex drive (Aronoff 1962, Voss and Keller 1983). Somewhat later, Buhler and colleagues (Buhler et al. 1928) proposed that curiosity could be interpreted as a manifestation of the ‘investigatory reflex’—the label that Pavlov (1927) gave to the tendency of his canine subjects to orient themselves toward novel stimuli.

The first well-researched and coherent account of curiosity was offered by Berlyne (1960). Struck by similarities between curiosity and drives such as hunger, Berlyne viewed curiosity as a type of drive. In support of this view, he argued that curiosity exhibits drive-like qualities: it has strong motivational force, intensifies over some interval, and produces arousal if not ‘satisfied’ (see Loewenstein 1994, p. 81).

In contrast to Berlyne’s drive theory, White (1959) argued that curiosity results from the motivation to master one’s environment. Reinterpreting the phenomena that Berlyne had cited in support of his perspective, White argued that curiosity has none of the characteristics usually associated with physiological drives such as hunger. When one becomes satiated from eating one type of food, for example, almost all food decreases in appeal. In contrast, satisfying one’s curiosity in one area has a negligible impact on curiosity in other areas (see Fowler 1965). White’s analysis was extended by Deci, who proposed to subsume curiosity under ‘the more general realm of all intrinsically motivated behaviors’ (Deci 1975, p. 53).

Yet a third theoretical interpretation of curiosity was proposed by Hunt (1963), who saw curiosity as a response to violated expectations or perceived environmental incongruity, both of which signal an incomplete understanding of the environment. Hunt’s theory of curiosity drew on the writings of Hebb and Piaget, and others, which had emphasized the importance of violated expectations as interrupters or motivators of behavior. Hunt’s incongruity account of curiosity was refined by Kagan (1972) in a classic paper on motivation that postulated four basic human motives: the motive to resolve uncertainty, sensory motives, anger, and hostility, and the motive for mastery. The first he saw as synonymous with curiosity. Kagen extended Hunt’s analysis in part by pointing to sources of uncertainty not discussed by Hunt: incompatibility between ideas, incompatibility between ideas and behavior (both based on Festinger’s cognitive dissonance theory), and the inability to predict the future.

Most recently, Loewenstein (1994) proposed an ‘information gap’ account of curiosity that integrates insights from incongruity theories, Gestalt psychology, and behavioral decision theory. According to this theory, curiosity arises from the perception of a gap between what one knows and what one wants to know. The theory attempts to make sense of three characteristics of curiosity: its intensity (particularly as compared to the often-subdued pleasure one derives from the satisfaction of curiosity), its transience, and its association with impulsive behavior.

1.2 Measurement Of Curiosity

A variety of paper-and-pencil scales have been developed to measure an individual’s state or trait curiosity (e.g., Day 1971, Naylor 1981, Spielberger 1975). Other attempts to measure curiosity have relied on teacher evaluations, peer evaluations, and self-evaluations (Maw and Maw 1972), as well as the tendency to explore curiosity-evoking items (Coie 1974).

Research on the measurement of trait and state curiosity has produced a number of interesting findings. For example, positively worded items that measure curiosity typically load on a separate, and largely uncorrelated, dimension from negatively worded items. These results have been interpreted as indicating that curiosity (measured by positively worded items) and boredom (measured by negatively worded items) do not lie on a unidimensional continuum, but rather reflect different underlying phenomena.

The use of curiosity scales to measure individual levels of curiosity or to study group differences is, however, inherently problematic. Inevitably, to measure a person’s curiosity, one has to measure their curiosity about something, but different people are curious about different things. Thus, if older people register as highly curious on a particular scale, it may be because that scale includes items that evoke curiosity in the elderly. The near intractability of this problem may help to explain why studies of group differences in curiosity have yielded contradictory relationships between curiosity and age, gender, and other demographic factors.

2. Two Gaps In The Curiosity Literature

With the current focus on individual and group differences, two aspects of curiosity have received inadequate attention. First, little research has examined curiosity’s situational determinants. Second, few investigations have studied curiosity’s neural underpinnings.

The lack of attention to situational determinants is unfortunate because insights in this area could have much greater practical ramifications than measures of individual or group differences. Most people are curious some of the time—often intensely so—but at other times completely lacking in curiosity. Knowledge of the situational determinants of curiosity could aid in the development of educational interventions to stimulate curiosity or interventions to reduce youthful curiosity about harmful drugs.

Educational psychologists have made the greatest progress on situational determinants in their attempts to stimulate curiosity in the classroom. For example, Lowry and Johnson (1981) found that group inter-actions which promoted epistemic conflict stimulated students’ curiosity. In another investigation of situational determinants, Loewenstein (1994) tested and confirmed the main prediction of his information gap account of curiosity—that curiosity to learn a specific piece of information increases with the accumulation of background information.

The second major void in the curiosity literature is investigation of its neural underpinnings. In one of the few discussions of this topic, Panksepp (1998) argues that the mesolimbic dopamine system, an area where local application of electrical stimulation evokes exploratory and search behavior, plays a critical role in curiosity. Studies that have measured the response of neurons in this system find that they are activated by novel stimuli that elicit orienting reactions, but that for most stimuli this activation only lasts for a few presentations (Schulz et al. 1997). One study also found that electrical stimulation of a subregion of this area produced a subjective response in one human subject that was reminiscent of curiosity (Heath 1963). Writing of an electrical stimulus repeatedly chosen by this subject, Heath noted that it

did not, however, induce the most pleasurable response; in fact, it induced irritability. The subject reported that he was almost able to recall a memory during this stimulation, but he could not quite grasp it. The frequent self-stimulations were an endeavor to bring this elusive memory into clear focus.

It is also worthy of note that the same region plays a central role in Berridge’s account of ‘wanting’ and ‘liking’ (see Berridge 1999). Traditional accounts of motivation assume that people want to engage in actions because they expect to like the consequences of those actions. However, Berridge and co-authors have found that wanting and liking often diverge, and they attribute such divergences to the separation of the two systems in the brain. Analogous to Panksepp’s view that the mesolimbic dopamine system is the seat of ‘seeking’ behavior, Berridge argues that it plays a central role in ‘wanting.’ The idea that curiosity may be centered in the wanting, but not in the liking system, is of interest given Loewenstein’s (1994) argument that one of curiosity’s salient features is that the intensity of the motivation to possess information—the wanting—is often vastly out of proportion to the pleasure—i.e., liking—that one experiences upon obtaining the information.

Positioned at the junction of motivation and cognition, the investigation of curiosity has the potential to bridge the historical gulf between the two paradigms. The two most promising avenues for future research are the situational determinants and neural underpinnings of curiosity. An enhanced understanding of situational determinants could produce significant practical benefits and could also provide evidence supporting or challenging some of the alternative theories that have been proposed (which differ in terms of the situational determinants they identify). A better understanding of the neural underpinnings of curiosity could help to clarify issues such as whether exploratory behavior and specific curiosity are closely related phenomena in the sense of sharing underlying neural mechanisms.

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