Curiosity about cigarette smoking is a risk-factor for smoking initiation. Here we test the extent to which curiosity may be leveraged in health communications designed to prevent smoking initiation during adolescence by testing whether adolescent never-smokers exhibit curiosity about tobacco-related health information and whether this curiosity can facilitate recall of this information. Participants (n=294 never-smoking adolescents, ages 14-16 years; n=499 never-smoking adults, ages 25-27 years) performed a trivia guessing task wherein they guessed the answers to general trivia and smoking-related trivia questions. A subset of participants (n=153 adolescents; n=151 adults) completed a surprise trivia memory task one week later and answered the previously viewed questions. Results indicate that adolescents are no less curious about tobacco-related trivia than they are about general trivia and that curiosity about the answers to tobacco-related-trivia is associated with more accurate recall of tobacco-related trivia answers one week later. Findings suggest that engendering states of curiosity for tobacco-related information may facilitate retention of that information in never-smoking adolescents.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.