Faculty
Social Science
Supervisor Name
Stefan Köhler
Description
Curiosity is an integral part of motivation and results in information-seeking behaviors to obtain rewarding information. Theories on curiosity suggest that it occurs when an information gap is detected. Here, we explored whether the assessment of familiarity may result in the induction of curiosity. We employed 3 phases, the first involving memorization of face-name pairs. Next, participants were presented with new and the old faces and were asked to judge whether they fully remembered the name, whether the face was familiar despite the name being unrecallable, or whether the face nor name was familiar. To conclude, we allowed participants to restudy up to half of the items, as a measure of information-seeking. Results showed that people most often restudied faces they deemed familiar but couldn’t recall names for. This familiarity preference demonstrated that our curiosity can be driven by information that we have familiarity with, but do not fully remember.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License
Document Type
Poster
Familiarity as a Motivator for Information-Seeking
Curiosity is an integral part of motivation and results in information-seeking behaviors to obtain rewarding information. Theories on curiosity suggest that it occurs when an information gap is detected. Here, we explored whether the assessment of familiarity may result in the induction of curiosity. We employed 3 phases, the first involving memorization of face-name pairs. Next, participants were presented with new and the old faces and were asked to judge whether they fully remembered the name, whether the face was familiar despite the name being unrecallable, or whether the face nor name was familiar. To conclude, we allowed participants to restudy up to half of the items, as a measure of information-seeking. Results showed that people most often restudied faces they deemed familiar but couldn’t recall names for. This familiarity preference demonstrated that our curiosity can be driven by information that we have familiarity with, but do not fully remember.