The Role of Autonomic Arousal in Curiosity Sparked by Unsuccessful Memory Recall
Abstract
States of curiosity, which reflect temporary motivational tendencies to seek out information, play a critical role in learning and memory. Recent work from our lab suggests that metacognitive retrieval experiences related to unsuccessful memory recall can spark curiosity; we have found that feeling-of-knowing (FOK) experiences predict to what extent participants will subsequently seek information they cannot recall. Here, we asked whether autonomic arousal plays a role in the generation of this retrieval-induced curiosity. Further, we asked if subsequent access to the information that cannot be recalled is rewarding and whether autonomic arousal plays a role in the anticipation of reward. We examined pupil size as a marker of autonomic arousal while participants made FOK judgments about previously studied face-name pairs they could not recall. Subsequently, participants were provided limited opportunities to seek out names and asked to rate their level of satisfaction upon viewing selected names. Behaviourally, we replicated our previous findings, with FOK experiences predicting information seeking and found that access to unrecalled information was rewarding as indicated by satisfaction ratings. Our pupillary results showed that as retrieval-induced curiosity increased, so did autonomic arousal, but arousal levels were not linked to subsequent information seeking though were found to play a role in the anticipation of the relief of curiosity. These results suggest that autonomic arousal plays a role in the induction of curiosity, but the motivation to seek missing information may not be driven by autonomic arousal, and furthermore that anticipatory autonomic arousal may reflect anticipation of rewarding information.