A potential way of enquiry into human curiosity

Abstract

A powerful search for 'curiosity' or its related topics at the online American Psychological Association PsycNET database will produce comparatively disappointing meagreness of resource. This reflects our scanty knowledge in this field though curiosity is widely recognised as one of the most important factors that contribute to motivation and effectiveness in education and scientific discovery. Lack of understanding in curiosity may be due partly to limitation of research methodology and technology. This paper suggests using Google Trends as a tool for the study of curiosity and its measurement. The observation based on this tool discusses external stimuli, accessible resource and surprisingness that are closely related to curiosity.Curiosity is defined as a desire to acquire new information and knowledge and new sensory experience that motivates exploratory behaviour (Litman & Spielberger, 2003). It plays a very important role in human cognitive development, education and scientific discovery. Dewey (1910) emphasises that curiosity is 'the only sure guarantee of the acquisition of the primary facts upon which inference must base itself '.Loewenstein (1994) states that curiosity study experienced two periods in the 20th century-the 1960s' research focused on curiosity's underlying cause and the 1970-80s' intense activity of quantitatively measuring curiosity. However, the measurement is extraordinarily difficult and research on curiosity scales, behaviour and individual characteristics produced contradictory findings (Loewenstein). Curiosity's lack of scholarly acknowledgement is due partly to measurement and conceptual issues (Reio, Petrosko, Wiswell & Thongsukmag, 2006).In his seminal and most influential work, Berlyne (1960) dichotomises curiosity into perceptual and epistemic explorations-the former is applied to describe animals' behaviour, the latter to human behaviour. In summing up approaches to conceptualisation and measurement of curiosity, Henderson and Moore (1979) emphasised that

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