{"pk":29397,"title":"Quantifying Curiosity: A Formal Approach to Dissociating Causes of Curiosity","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Curiosity motivates exploration and is beneficial for learning,but curiosity is not always experienced when facing theunknown. In the present research, we address this selectivity:what causes curiosity to be experienced under somecircumstances but not others? Using a Bayesian reinforcementlearning model, we disentangle four possible influences oncuriosity that have typically been confounded in previousresearch: surprise, local uncertainty/expected informationgain, global uncertainty, and global expected informationgain. In two experiments, we find that backward-lookinginfluences (concerning beliefs based on prior experience) andforward-looking influences (concerning expectations aboutfuture learning) independently predict reported curiosity, andthat forward-looking influences explain the most variance.These findings begin to disentangle the complexenvironmental features that drive curiosity.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"curiosity; learning; surprise; uncertainty;expected information gain"}],"section":"Facets of Cognition","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2vx4g96n","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Emily","middle_name":"","last_name":"Liquin","name_suffix":"","institution":"Princeton University","department":""},{"first_name":"Frederick","middle_name":"","last_name":"Callaway","name_suffix":"","institution":"Princeton University","department":""},{"first_name":"Tania","middle_name":"","last_name":"Lombrozo","name_suffix":"","institution":"Princeton University","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2020-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/29397/galley/19257/download/"}]}