Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Curiosity is considered essential for learning and sustained en-gagement, yet stimulating curiosity in educational contexts re-mains a challenge. Can people’s curiosity about a topic bestimulated by evidence that the topic has potential value? Intwo experiments we show that increasing people’s perceptionsabout the usefulness of a scientific topic also influences theircuriosity and subsequent information search. Our results alsoshow that simply presenting interesting facts is not enough toinfluence curiosity, and that people are more likely to be curi-ous about a topic if they perceive it to be directly valuable tothem. Given the link between curiosity and learning, these re-sults have important implications for science communicationand education more broadly.