The Wick in the Candle of Learning

Abstract

Curiosity has been described as the "wick in the candle of learning" but its underlying mechanisms are not well-understood. We scanned subjects with fMRI while they read trivia questions. The level of curiosity when reading questions is correlated with activity in caudate regions previously suggested to be involved in anticipated reward or encoding prediction error. This finding led to a behavioral study showing that subjects spend more scarce resources (either limited tokens, or waiting time) to find out answers when they are more curious. The fMRI also showed that curiosity increases activity in memory areas when subjects guess incorrectly, which suggests that curiosity may enhance memory for surprising new information. This prediction about memory enhancement is confirmed in a behavioral study-higher curiosity in the initial session is correlated with better recall of surprising answers 10 days later.

Influence of reward motivation on human declarative memory

“…Curiosity on its own has been demonstrated to mimic extrinsic reward anticipation and novelty. For example, Kang et al (2009) found that curiosity is associated with higher arousal (increased pupil dilation) and elevated striatal and prefrontal BOLD activity during anticipation of the outcome (in this case, the answer to an interesting quiz question).…”

“…Therefore, presentation of a reward (or a novel stimulus) may affect events occurring several seconds to minutes afterward, during the time when the evoked dopaminergic input from the VTA reaches the hippocampus. Gruber et al, 2014, (using a paradigm similar to Kang et al, 2009) found that a state of high curiosity (i.e., a state of intrinsic reward motivation) was associated with NAc and VTA activation and led to better free recall memory for trivia questions the participants were curious about, 1h after the encoding. Furthermore, this experiment directly tested the penumbra hypothesis by showing participants faces during the answer anticipation period.…”

What cognitive and affective states should technology monitor to support learning?

“…This role of self-efficacy on state curiosity in this knowledge strata was found to be as strong as the role of trait curiosity [18]. [20] found that the relationship between curiosity and self-efficacy may actually be an inverted u-shape suggesting that low curiosity levels may be due to either very low or very high self-efficacy. This points to further need to understand the self-efficacy of a learner in order to be able to provide appropriate intervention to address their curiosity levels.…”

“…The authors found that in cases where participants indicated not knowing the answer or that it was on the tip of their tongue, the reported level of confidence in the ability to identify the correct answer if given multiple options predicted the level of curiosity for the correct answer. Curiosity itself is an important state in learning as it directly affects information seeking behaviour [19] [20]. For example, [18] found higher levels of curiosity about the correct trivia answers to be significantly positively correlated with efforts made to retrieve these answers.…”

“…There have also been findings suggesting that curiosity further facilitates acquisition of knowledge. A study by [20] showed that regions of the brain linked to memory and learning were activated in those who reported higher levels of curiosity about the correct answers in a trivia task. In a follow-up study where participants were shown the correct trivia answers and were afterward invited to re-take the quiz after a fortnight, participants who had reported higher levels of curiosity (and had memory regions of the brain activated) were found to show significantly better recall of the correct answers.…”