UCLA

Curiosity motivates many of our everyday behaviors, including learning, hobbies, and goal pursuit. Theories of cognitive aging (e.g., Baltes & Baltes, 1990; Carstensen, 1999; Hess, 2014) suggest that knowledge-based goals may decline as we age in favor of social-emotional goals, and thus, maintaining curiosity to learn may not fit with our goals as we get older. However, curiosity in older age is associated with a variety of positive outcomes (Sakaki et al., 2018) and can improve learning and memory performance (Galli et al., 2018; Kang et al., 2009; McGillivray et al., 2015). The current dissertation examines how different forms of curiosity may shift across the adult lifespan (Chapter 2) as well as how curiosity works to influence learning, memory, and metacognition in both younger adults and older adults (Chapters 3 and 4).

Though some work suggests that curiosity declines with age (e.g., Chu et al., 2020), this dissertation (Study 1) reports evidence that different types of curiosity may show differential relationships with age. Specifically, one’s general tendency to be curious may decrease with increasing age, but one’s curiosity in response to interesting material, like trivia questions, may increase as we age, suggesting we may be more selective about when and why we experience curiosity in older age. Additionally, curiosity continues to be a motivator of learning and memory throughout the lifespan. Chapter 3 explores how this intrinsic motivation may interact with extrinsic motivation (i.e., value). Results suggest that both forms of motivation may independently influence both younger and older adults’ memory, but show different patterns on more detailed associative memory (i.e., memory for the binding of two or more pieces of information). Finally, Chapter 4 examines whether curiosity can influence memory for true and false information. The evidence suggests that curiosity may also improve memory for whether information is true or false, but that these effects may depend on the time course of curiosity (e.g., when curiosity is elicited vs. when curiosity is quenched). The current dissertation adds to our knowledge about how curiosity motivates learning and memory across the adult lifespan.