The Wick in the Candle of Learning

By Min Jeong Kang, Ming Hsu, Ian Krajbich, George Loewenstein, Samuel M. McClure, Joseph Tao-yi Wang, Colin F. Camerer. 2008

878 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Curiosity has been described as a desire for learning and knowledge, but its underlying mechanisms are not well understood. We scanned subjects with functional magnetic resonance imaging while they read trivia questions. The level of curiosity when reading questions was correlated with activity in caudate regions previously suggested to be involved in anticipated reward. This finding led to a behavioral study, which showed that subjects spent more scarce resources (either limited tokens or waiting time) to find out answers when they were more curious. The functional imaging also showed that curiosity increased activity in memory areas when subjects guessed incorrectly, which suggests that curiosity may enhance memory for surprising new information. This prediction about memory enhancement was confirmed in a behavioral study: Higher curiosity in an initial session was correlated with better recall of surprising answers 1 to 2 weeks later.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

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In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

Citations in the corpus

Science Is Awe-Some: The Emotional Antecedents of Science Learning (2017, background): “Experimental inductions of curiosity map onto this definition, the most common of which is presenting trivia questions that participants cannot answer but may desire to know the answer (Gruber, Gelman, & Ranganath, 2014; Kang et al., 2009).”
Disentangling Curiosity: Dimensionality, Definitions, and Distinctions from Interest in Educational Contexts (2014, positive): “Although the focus on knowledge identified within this review tends to be on knowledge as something to be internalized and recalled (e.g., Kang et al. 2009; Litman et al. 2005), research moving forward should examine ways in which curiosity aligns with educational goals of developing understanding…”
Suspense and Surprise (2015, neutral): “See Loewenstein ð1994Þ, Kang et al. ð2009Þ, or Golman and Loewenstein ð2012Þ.”
Process Account of Curiosity and Interest: A Reward-Learning Perspective (2018, background): “…current research on curiosity tends to focus on information-seeking behavior for knowledge that has only shortterm consequences (e.g., information about an outcome that would be revealed a few seconds later; Bennett et al. 2016) or little practical value (e.g., trivia questions; Kang et al. 2009).”
Students' level of boredom, boredom coping strategies, epistemic curiosity, and graded performance (2016, background): “…curiosity (Renner, 2006), and epistemic curiosity (Berlyne, 1954; Litman, 2008), and examined in different lines of research such as psychology (e.g., Litman, 2005; Loewenstein, 1994), neurobiology (e.g., Kang et al., 2009), and education (e.g., Eren, 2011; Engel, 2011; Richards et al., 2013).”
Interest development: Arousing situational interest affects the growth trajectory of individual interest (2017, background): “…the arousal of situational interest by appropriate precipitating events, such as puzzles or problems, is hard-wired and therefore—in principle—affecting every individual (Berlyne, 1954, 1962, 1978; Kang, Scharmann, Kang, & Noh, 2010; Kang et al., 2009; Loewenstein, 1994; Rotgans & Schmidt, 2014b).”
Revisiting the Conceptualization, Measurement, and Generation of Interest (2011, neutral): “Fifth, interest has a physiological/neurological basis; brain activations differ when a learner is and is not engaged with interest (e.g., Hidi, 2006; Kang et al., 2009; Palmer, 2009; Panksepp, 1998).”
Identity and Epistemic Emotions During Knowledge Revision: A Potential Account for the Backfire Effect (2016, background): “…empirical evidence shows that epistemic emotions are active (D’Mello& Graesser, 2012, 2014) and influential during learning, affecting intrinsic motivation (Kang et al., 2009), type of learning strategies used (Muis et al., 2015), and learning outcomes (D’Mello, Lehmann, Pekrun, & Graesser, 2014).”
The foraging brain (2015, positive): “Ultimately, we hope this line of work will be integrated into studies of the neural bases of information-seeking and curiosity — key drivers of search behavior in foraging [48,49 ,50], and to search more generally [7].”
From madness to genius: The Openness/Intellect trait domain as a paradoxical simplex (2012, neutral): “Dopamine potentiates exploration in behavior and cognition (Depue & Collins, 1999; Kang et al., 2009; Panksepp, 1998).”
The Role of Epistemic Emotions in Personal Epistemology and Self-Regulated Learning (2018, background): “Individuals may also experience surprise, curiosity, and confusion when incoming information is inconsistent with prior knowledge (D’Mello & Grasser, 2012), epistemic beliefs (Muis, Pekrun, et al., 2015), or recently processed information (Kang et al., 2009).”
Information Gaps: A Theory of Preferences Regarding the Presence and Absence of Information (2018, background): “3 Curiosity correlates with brain activity in regions thought to relate to anticipated reward (Kang et al., 2009), suggesting that information is a reward in and of itself.”
The Demand for, and Avoidance of, Information (2015, neutral): “Indeed, Kang et al. (2009) link curiosity to pupil dilation, which is a well-known, reliable measure of attention (Kahneman, 1973).”