Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

For some learning problems, information is readily available. For others, substantial time and effort is needed to acquire information. The present work tests whether this variation in "information accessibility" affects curiosity. In two experiments, we prompted adult participants to rate their curiosity about the answers to trivia questions. For each trivia question, participants were informed that information accessibility would be high—they would receive the answer with minimal time and effort—or low—they would receive the answer with substantial time and effort. We found that information accessibility affected decisions to seek information, but not self-reported curiosity. This suggests that curiosity is unhindered by the practical costs of information search.