Curiosity as filling, compressing, and reconfiguring knowledge networks

Abstract

Curiosity is an internally motivated search for information. It is enduring and open-ended, and may have evolved to help us build accurate mental representations of our ever-changing environments. Due to the significant role that curiosity plays in our lives, several theoretical constructs, such as the information gap theory and compression progress theory, have sought to explain how we engage in its practice. According to the former, curiosity is the drive to acquire information that is missing from our understanding of the world. According to the latter, curiosity is the drive to construct an increasingly parsimonious mental model of the world. To complement the densification processes inherent to these two theories, we propose the conformational change theory, wherein we posit that the practice of curiosity results in mental models with marked conceptual flexibility. To validate these three theories, we must overcome the fundamental challenge of constructing formal models of mental representations of knowledge. Here, we address that challenge by formalizing curiosity as the process of building a growing knowledge network. We then quantitatively investigate information gap theory, compression progress theory, and the conformational change theory of curiosity. In knowledge networks, gaps can be identified as topological cavities, compression progress can be quantified using network compressibility, and flexibility can be measured as the number of conformational degrees of freedom. We leverage data acquired from the online encyclopedia Wikipedia to determine the degree to which each theory explains the growth of knowledge networks built by individuals and by collectives. Our findings lend support to a pluralistic view of curiosity, wherein intrinsically motivated information acquisition fills knowledge gaps and simultaneously leads to increasingly compressible and flexible knowledge networks. Across individuals and collectives, we determine the contexts in which each theoretical account may be explanatory, thereby clarifying their complementary and distinct explanations of curiosity. Our findings offer a novel network theoretical perspective on intrinsically motivated information acquisition that may harmonize with or compel an expansion of the traditional taxonomy of curiosity.

Architectural styles of curiosity in global Wikipedia mobile app readership

“…In contrast to these existing tools, knowledge networks provide a framework to formulate objective functions that could support learning. Recent work has shown how the construction of knowledge networks is consistent with compression progress theory [40,91]. In this view, curiosity is the drive to obtain new information to construct mental models with higher compression (i.e., lower cost of representation) which improves the capacity for abstraction and generalization believed to be crucial for human learning [39,70].…”

“…Broadened exploration may enable people to build intellectual, emotional, and social resources [55,77]. Curiosity may help one not only to build resources in the sense of accumulation but also to creatively draw on resources to reinvent and reconfigure the structure of their beliefs, self, and relationships with each other [40]. In contrast to broad openness, a need for closure may drive a tendency to "seize and freeze" information.…”

“…Hunters build tight, constrained networks whereas busybodies build loose, broad networks; precisely how to characterize the networks of the dancer has remained elusive. The advantage of the network approach is that it can be used to develop models [39,40] and to formalize classical psychological and historico-philosophical taxonomies of curiosity [11].…”

Validation of the I- and D-type Epistemic Curiosity scale among Young Chinese Children and Implications on Early Curiosity Nurture

“…Futher, Zurn and Bassett (2018) proposed a network perspective for the understanding of epistemic curiosity and its in uence on personality, with networks connecting behaviors, skills, and memory retrieval. They and others have de ned the practice of curiosity as the development of knowledge networks (Patankar et al, 2022;Zurn & Bassett, 2018, 2019, suggesting that it plays a crucial role in personality development . Speci cally, the D type of curiosity in adults was associated with relatively tight networks and a greater tendency to return to previously visited concepts, whereas the I type was associated negatively with average edge weight or reinforcement with a preference for dissimilar concepts (Zurn & Bassett, 2018, 2019.…”