An Investigation of the Physiological Basis of Curiosity in Young Children and Adults

Humans across all developmental stages exhibit pervasive curiosity-driven behaviours to seek and acquire new information. From very early on in life, young infants are sensitive to novelty in their environment and they actively and constantly explore their surroundings through their eyes and body. Adults spend time reading books, engaging with puzzles and quizzes as well as other information- seeking activities (e.g., gossip) without apparent incentives. Driven by curiosity, scientists take expeditions to discover the unknown. They dive into the deepest ocean on earth to unravel mysteries of the deep sea and have invented the Curiosity Rover for exploring the unknown space on Mars. Curiosity as an inner need for knowledge not only facilitates and shapes human cognitive development but also expands our knowledge boundaries and inspires innovation and discovery. As a key driver of cognitive development, curiosity promotes exploration, boosts learning and enhances memory. Much research suggests a few reasons for this enhancing effect including prior knowledge, curiosity anticipation and curiosity resolution. For example, when curiosity is piqued by an unsolved quiz that one might know something about, the anticipation of the answer to the quiz and the answer to the quiz (i.e., curiosity resolution) are thought to be crucial in advancing learning. In other words, the degree to which curiosity is elicited depends on an individual's prior knowledge, and once curiosity is elicited, it may create a state of anticipation, setting up a 'ready-to-learn' mode for a learner to learn, motivating the learner to explore and seek information.
The key finding of my PhD thesis indeed shows that curiosity elicitation is associated with a certain arousal mechanism (the 'ready-to-learn' mode), resulting in an enhancing effect on learning, especially in young children. Most importantly, this finding has raised under-researched questions about the roles of physiological arousal and developmental change in curiosity-driven learning. Curiosity has been measured by adults' self-reporting, by infants' looking time to stimuli on a screen, by changes in pupil size, and specific brain responses to experienced information. To understand curiosity across development and in adults, new methods and analysis skills are needed. Therefore, in this Fellowship, I will apply these methods and learn new ones to conduct a follow-on study, focusing on examining the role of the physiological basis and exploring the developmental changes in curiosity-driven learning in young children and adults. More specifically, this project will involve eye-tracking, pupillometry and motion capture measures, providing a novel direction in the field by applying a multimethod approach to encapsulate the basic mechanism of curiosity, offering proof-of-concept evidence in my future ESRC New Investigator grant application.
Alongside the proposed project, during the Fellowship I will disseminate my findings to academic and non-academic audiences through conference presentations, peer-reviewed publications, lay summaries as well as outreach events for early-years practitioners and the public to generate regional, national and global impacts. The Fellowship will seek to raise awareness of the role of curiosity in cognition and education, bridging the gap between research, practice and the public, increasing the practical impacts of my research.