On Curiosity: A Fundamental Aspect of Personality, a Practice of Network Growth

Abstract

Human personality is reflected in patterns—or networks—of behavior, either in thought or action. Curiosity is an oft-treasured component of one’s personality, commonly associated with information-seeking proclivities with distinct neurophysiological correlates. The markers of curiosity can differ substantially across people, suggesting the possibility that personality also determines the architectural style of one’s curiosity. Yet progress in defining those styles, and marking their neurophysiological basis, has been hampered by fairly fundamental difficulties in defining curiosity itself. Here, we offer and exercise a definition of the practice of curiosity as knowledge network building, one particular pattern of thought behavior. To unpack this definition and motivate its utility, we begin with a short primer on network science and describe how the mathematical object of a network can be used to map items and relations that are characteristic of bodies of knowledge. Next, we turn to a discussion of how networks grow, how their growth can be modeled, and how the practice of curiosity can be formalized as a process of network growth. We pay particular attention to how individuals may differ in how they build their knowledge networks, and discuss how the sort, manner, and action of building can be modulated by experience. We discuss how this definition of the practice of curiosity motivates new experiments and theory development at the interdisciplinary intersection of network science, personality neuroscience, education, and curiosity studies. We close with a note on the potential of network science to inform studies of other domains of personality, and the patterns of thought– or action–behavior characteristic thereof.

Inconsistent curiosity: Augmentation and blunting of curiosity in daily life and implications for well-being

“…The everyday behaviors through which curiosity is theorized to lead to the accruement of psychological resources remain to be characterized. Emerging perspectives conceive of curiosity as a knowledge network building practice in which concepts and the connections between them are added and taken away during the intrinsic information-seeking that characterizes curiosity (54,55). This knowledge network building perspective calls for a greater consideration of everyday curiosity behaviors and presents new tools from network science to formally study the manner in which curiosity drives knowledge network growth.…”

Forma mentis networks quantify crucial differences in STEM perception between students and experts

“…A forma mentis network consists of words as nodes, each with a valence attribute, and free associations as links. Rather than being based on automatic natural language processing, these networks directly access the mental lexicon of human participants, addressing the orthogonal influences of semantic knowledge and emotional affect that drive the processing of information Vitevitch, 2008;Vitevitch et al, 2018) and its consequent reactions (Adelman & Estes, 2013;Christensen et al, 2018;Gaillard et al, 2006;Zurn & Bassett, 2018).…”

“…Psycholinguistic evidence has shown that the associative structure of the mental lexicon influences language processes such as word learning (Hills & Siew, 2018;Stella, 2019;Stella, Beckage, & Brede, 2017) and processing (De Deyne, Navarro, & Storms, 2013;De Deyne, Navarro, Perfors, Brysbaert, & Storms, 2018;Kenett, Levi, Anaki, & Faust, 2017;Steyvers & Tenenbaum, 2005). This strong link between mental lexicon structure and language usage promoted the use of network models for a variety of processes such as the discovery of writing styles from word co-occurrences in texts (Amancio, 2015) or predicting the creativity of individuals (Kenett, Anaki, & Faust, 2014;Kenett et al, 2018), their curiosity (Zurn & Bassett, 2018), their openness to new experience (Christensen, Kenett, Cotter, Beaty, & Silvia, 2018), their expertise in a given domain (Siew, 2018;Valenzuela Castellanos, Pérez Villalobos, Bustos, & Salcedo Lagos, 2018) and their perceived anxiety toward a topic (Siew, McCartney, & FORMA MENTIS NETWORKS IN STEM 6 Vitevitch, 2019). Forma mentis networks rely on the framework of cognitive network science to represent the associative and emotional structure of concepts in the mental lexicon.…”

Hunters, busybodies, and the knowledge network building associated with curiosity

“…The hunter instead "wishes [they] had a few hundred helpers and good, well-trained hounds that [they] could drive into the history of the human soul to round up [their] game" 22 (p.59) in a targeted search for information. Both styles are considered curious practice, but there are individual differences in the extent to which each type of curious practice is expressed in behavior 23 . Tendencies to exhibit one form of curiosity practice over another will lead to the accumulation of different types of information and resources over time.…”