Magic Curiosity Arousing Tricks (MagicCATs): A novel stimulus collection to induce epistemic emotions

Abstract

There has been considerable interest in empirical research on epistemic emotions, i.e., emotions related to knowledge-generating qualities of cognitive tasks and activities such as curiosity, interest, and surprise. One big challenge when studying epistemic emotions is systematically inducting these emotions in restricted experimental settings. The current study created a novel stimulus set called Magic Curiosity Arousing Tricks (MagicCATs): a collection of 166 short magic trick video clips that aim to induce a variety of epistemic emotions. MagicCATs are freely available for research and can be used in a variety of ways to examine epistemic emotions. Rating data also support that the magic tricks elicit a variety of epistemic emotions with sufficient inter-stimulus variability, demonstrating good psychometric properties for their use in psychological experiments. Keywords intrinsic motivation. epistemic emotions. curiosity. science of magic Recent years have seen a surge of interest in the topic of socalled epistemic emotions. Epistemic emotions refer to a group of emotions which are related to the knowledgegenerating qualities of cognitive tasks and activities (Brun, Doğuoğlu, & Kuenzle, 2008; Muis, Chevrier, & Singh, 2018). These emotions typically include surprise, curiosity and interest. Recent studies have revealed that these epistemic emotions have profound implications for cognitive processing * Hiroki Ozono

The Differences and Similarities between Curiosity and Interest: Meta-analysis and Network Analyses

“…The results showed that the correlations between them are at a moderate-level withinperson. These results are consistent with previous studies examining within-person relationship between curiosity and interest using distinct stimuli (e.g., trivia questions; Fastrich et al, 2018;Ozono et al, 2020) and provide convergent evidence that curiosity and interest represent distinct subjective feelings, or in other words, have unique aspects with some overlap.…”

The interaction of curiosity and reward on long-term memory in younger and older adults

“…Regardless of the precise nature of the interaction between reward and curiosity, our findings suggest that intrinsic motivation to learn from curiosity leads to an almost identical increase in the probability of correctly recalling a trivia answer as extrinsic motivation from reward. Therefore, interventions aimed at enhancing memory and learning outcomes can target intrinsic motivation states (e.g., curiosity, interest, satisfaction, and surprise; Ozono, et al, 2020; Ryan & Deci, 2000;) instead of extrinsic contingencies of reinforcement (e.g., monetary bonuses, testing grades; Slavin, 2010; Stan, 2012)…”

A reward-learning framework of knowledge acquisition: An integrated account of curiosity, interest, and intrinsic–extrinsic rewards.

“…In empirical work, researchers have traditionally relied on experimental approaches, with the main focus on short-term (mostly one-shot) information-seeking behavior or associated momentary feelings. In fact, common experimental paradigms used to empirically examine curiosity are gambling tasks that provide participants with the opportunity to “peek” at the outcome of a gamble that cannot be changed (e.g., Blanchard et al, 2015; Bennett et al, 2016; Rodriguez Cabrero et al, 2019); or a series of textual or visual stimuli aimed to trigger momentary feelings of curiosity on a trial-by-trial basis, such as trivia questions (McGillivray et al, 2015), blurred images (Jepma et al, 2012), and magic tricks (Ozono et al, 2020).…”