ABSTRACT

We used a novel missing-letters task to induce curiosity, where participants were shown as a stimulus a nine letter word with some letters missing (2, 4, or 7 missing letters) and asked to complete the word. We found that both information gap (number of letters missing) and participants’ uncertainty regarding the complete word predicted their curiosity to learn the complete word. Participants were later shown the complete word, and their learning satisfaction (measured directly through self-ratings, and indirectly through the affect misattribution procedure) was found to be influenced by the information gap, their familiarity with the word, and whether they had been able to correctly guess the complete word. We proposed a schema verification view of curiosity—people resolve information gaps because they are motivated to verify their prior schema of the environment—to explain our findings and to integrate it with prior work on the topic.

摘要

我们使用了一种新颖的失踪字母任务来激发好奇心，在该刺激中，参与者被视为一个刺激的9个字母的单词，其中一些字母缺少（2、4或7个字母缺失），并要求完成该单词。我们发现信息缺口（缺少字母的数量）和参与者对完整单词的不确定性都预测了他们学习完整单词的好奇心。后来，向参与者展示了完整的单词，发现他们的学习满意度（直接通过自我评估来衡量，并通过情感错误归因程序间接衡量）受到信息缺口，他们对该单词的熟悉程度以及他们是否能够做到的影响正确猜出完整的单词。