Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

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.