Interests are an essential part of the learning process, yet no previous work has examined the relationship between learning and individual differences in domain-general interests. Across a pilot study and a confirmatory follow-up study, we tested whether the broad interest traits of person orientation and thing orientation predict memory for STEM-related topics. In both studies (total N = 624), college student participants read brief educational texts on a randomly assigned STEM topic. The topics included artificial limb design, self-driving automobiles, and the anatomy of vision. Recall performance was measured using open-ended factual questions from the readings. Participants with stronger thing-oriented interests recalled more information from the texts, while person orientation was unrelated to recall. Thing orientation also predicted performance beyond the variance explained by gender and previous knowledge. The findings from these studies highlight the cognitive consequences of interests and present implications for STEM education.

兴趣是学习过程中必不可少的部分，但是以前没有工作研究过学习与领域通用兴趣中个体差异之间的关系。在一项先导研究和一项确认性后续研究中，我们测试了人取向和事物取向的广泛兴趣特征是否可以预测STEM相关主题的记忆。在两项研究中（总N = 624），大学生参与者阅读了有关随机分配的STEM主题的简短教育文章。主题包括假肢设计，自动驾驶汽车和视觉解剖。召回表现是通过阅读中的开放性事实问题来衡量的。具有更强的面向事物兴趣的参与者从文本中回忆了更多的信息，而以人为本与回忆无关。事物取向还预测了性能，这超出了性别和先前知识所解释的差异。这些研究的结果突出了兴趣的认知后果，并为STEM教育带来了现实意义。