Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We present a rational analysis of curiosity, proposing that peo-ple’s curiosity is driven by seeking stimuli that maximize theirability to make appropriate responses in the future. This per-spective offers a way to unify previous theories of curiosityinto a single framework. Experimental results confirm ourmodel’s predictions, showing how the relationship between cu-riosity and confidence can change significantly depending onthe nature of the environment.