UC Santa Barbara

Curiosity has occupied a pivotal position in the study of motivation, emotion, and cognition where it has been associated with an impressive host of positive outcomes; however experimental research is surprisingly limited. Existing methods rely on the induction of deprivation-based curiosity, a subfacet of epistemic curiosity driven by uncertainty and induced via presentation of information gaps. This facet has been linked to negative affect and, more recently, a host of intellectual shortcomings. Interest curiosity is a subfacet of epistemic curiosity associated with a positive and appetitive interest in learning and exploration and has been associated with increased general knowledge, creativity, humility, and well-being. Experimental research on this subfacet is almost completely missing, largely due to the difficulty in promoting this state under laboratory conditions. Furthermore, research on epistemic curiosity is limited in that there are no well-validated measures of state curiosity, and few objective indicators of trait curiosity beyond self-report. This dissertation research strove to fill these voids by taking a broad behavioral, perceptual, and phenomenological approach to consider what drives individual differences in epistemic curiosity. Study 1 reports on a novel measure for capturing states of interest curiosity, as well as a novel, easily implementable, and effective induction method for promoting it. Study 2, 3, and 4 explore theoretically grounded indicators of state and trait epistemic curiosity including gaze patterns (study 2) and phenomenological indices (study 3 and 4). In study 2, distinct patterns of salience attribution are found for individuals as a function of trait epistemic curiosity, particularly more consistent prioritization of visual features that may provide maximal information gain. Using both an ecologically rich experience sampling study and a casually informative experimental study, studies 3 and 4 report robust and striking patterns of associations between everyday features of thought and both trait (study 3 and 4) and state (study 4) epistemic curiosity; here, differences between deprivation and interest curiosity are further revealed. The final study (study 5) brings together many of these elements to examine the role affective, attentional, and phenomenological aspects of interest curiosity may play in driving the positive outcomes associated with it, including learning and information seeking behavior. Here it was found that interest curiosity mediates the effects of the novel curiosity induction on information seeking behavior and positive affect. Interest curiosity is also found to improve attentional engagement during reading, with potential implications for learning. This research made several important empirical, theoretical, and methodological contributions by developing new ways to assess trait and state epistemic curiosity, grounded in neurobiological and psychological theory, and using these assessments to run the first ever experimental studies on appetitive states of interest curiosity.