Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Given the vast nature of information available in the world,humans must select a small subset from which to learn in alifetime. Yet we know little about the factors that motivatelearners’ decisions to attend to select certain informationsources over others. We investigate the role of topicknowledge on curiosity in a new domain: novel news stories.We influenced listeners’ perception of their topic knowledgein these novel domains by independently varying the numberof sentences they heard and the number of sentences thatremained after a decision point. Listeners were most curiouswhen they reported intermediate levels of topic knowledge.As expected, learners were less likely to switch away fromcontent that they were curious about. This resultdemonstrates that topic knowledge directly impacts learners’curiosity and thus has downstream influences on their futureinterests and information-seeking behaviors.