Thirst for knowledge: The effects of curiosity and interest on memory in younger and older adults.

Abstract

Given age-related memory impairments, one’s level of curiosity or interest could enhance memory for certain information. In the current study, younger and older adults read trivia questions, rated how curious they were to learn each answer, provided confidence and interest ratings, and judgments of learning (JOL) after learning the answer. No age-related differences in memory were found. Analyses indicated that curiosity and interest contributed to the formation of JOLs. Additionally, interest had a unique increasing relationship with older, but not younger, adults’ memory performance after a week. The results suggest that subjective interest may serve to enhance older adults’ memory.

White matter pathways supporting individual differences in epistemic and perceptual curiosity

“…The momentary experience of curiosity can be seen as a motivational state that facilitates knowledge acquisition (Silvia & Kashdan, 2009; Gottlieb and Oudeyer, 2018). Consistent with this idea, studies have shown that states of high curiosity enhance long-term memory (Kang et al, 2009; Gruber et al, 2014; McGillivray et al, 2015; Marvin and Shohamy, 2016; Stare et al, 2018; Galli et al, 2018). Furthermore, recent neuroimaging evidence suggests that state curiosity enhances memory via increased activation in the mesolimbic dopaminergic circuit including the hippocampus (Gruber et al, 2014; Kang et al, 2009).…”

Curiosity and surprise enhance memory differently in adolescents than in children

“…Thus, IPEs reflect the discrepancy between the actual value of the presented information relative to the participants' initial curiosity expectation. To examine the interactive effects of curiosity and IPE, we performed linear mixed-level analyses on trial-level data (see Marvin & Shohamy, 2016;McGillivray et al, 2015). Mixed-effect models allow within-person examination of curiosity and surprise effects with more fine-grained distinctions between levels of curiosity and IPE, while at the same time accounting for variability across participants.…”

“…In addition to these benefits, the subjective interestingness or surprise associated with the actual information also affects later memory (Fastrich, Kerr, Castel, & Murayama, 2018;Marvin & Shohamy, 2016;McGillivray, Murayama, & Castel, 2015). For example, Marvin and Shohamy (2016) calculated information prediction errors (IPEs) which reflect the difference between the subjective interestingness associated with the information and the initial curiosity about the information.…”

“…In addition, a recent longitudinal study in 8 -29 years old participants demonstrated that learning from feedback increased in the transition between childhood and adolescence (Peters & Crone, 2017). As the effects of surprise associated with intrinsically valuable information have only recently been demonstrated in adults (Fastrich et al, 2018;Marvin & Shohamy, 2016;McGillivray et al, 2015), it is an open question to what extent they are also present at the transition from childhood to adolescence.…”

“…To induce curiosity, we used a trivia paradigm in which participants consecutively encoded trivia questions that were associated with varying degrees of curiosity and anticipated the correct answer (see Figure 1). Studies with adults have repeatedly shown that answers to trivia questions associated with high curiosity are better remembered than answers to low-curiosity trivia questions (Fastrich et al, 2018;Galli et al, 2018;Gruber et al, 2014;Kang et al, 2009;Marvin & Shohamy, 2016;McGillivray et al, 2015;Stare, Gruber, Nadel, Ranganath, & Gómez, 2018;Wade & Kidd, 2019). The paradigm consisted of a screening phase in which we selected participant-specific trivia questions for which the answers were unknown and which varied in subjective curiosity.…”