TY - JOUR
T1 - A functional approach to explanation-seeking curiosity
AU - Liquin, Emily G.
AU - Lombrozo, Tania
N1 - Funding Information:
We would like to thank members of the Concepts and Cognition Lab for their useful comments. Some of the results reported here were presented at the 2018 meeting of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology and the 2018 meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, and we are grateful to these audiences for their discussion and feedback. This work was supported by a James S. McDonnell Foundation Scholar Award in Understanding Human Cognition and a Templeton Foundation Grant awarded to TL, as well as an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship to EL [grant numbers DGE-1752814 and DGE-1656466]. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the McDonnell Foundation, the Templeton Foundation, or the National Science Foundation.
Funding Information:
We would like to thank members of the Concepts and Cognition Lab for their useful comments. Some of the results reported here were presented at the 2018 meeting of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology and the 2018 meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, and we are grateful to these audiences for their discussion and feedback. This work was supported by a James S. McDonnell Foundation Scholar Award in Understanding Human Cognition and a Templeton Foundation Grant awarded to TL, as well as an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship to EL [grant numbers DGE-1752814 and DGE-1656466]. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the McDonnell Foundation, the Templeton Foundation, or the National Science Foundation.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 The Authors
PY - 2020/6
Y1 - 2020/6
N2 - Why do some (and only some) observations prompt people to ask “why?” We propose a functional approach to “Explanation-Seeking Curiosity” (ESC): the state that motivates people to seek an explanation. If ESC tends to prompt explanation search when doing so is likely to be beneficial, we can use prior work on the functional consequences of explanation search to derive “forward-looking” candidate triggers of ESC—those that concern expectations about the downstream consequences of pursuing explanation search. Across three studies (N = 867), we test hypotheses derived from this functional approach. In Studies 1–3, we find that ESC is most strongly predicted by expectations about future learning and future utility. We also find that judgments of novelty, surprise, and information gap predict ESC, consistent with prior work on curiosity; however, the role for forward-looking considerations is not reducible to these factors. In Studies 2–3, we find that predictors of ESC form three clusters, expectations about learning (about the target of explanation), expectations about export (to other cases and future contexts), and backward-looking considerations (having to do with the relationship between the target of explanation and prior knowledge). Additionally, these clusters are consistent across stimulus sets that probe ESC, but not fact-seeking curiosity. These findings suggest that explanation-seeking curiosity is aroused in a systematic way, and that people are not only sensitive to the match or mismatch between a given stimulus and their current or former beliefs, but to how they expect an explanation for that stimulus to improve their epistemic state.
AB - Why do some (and only some) observations prompt people to ask “why?” We propose a functional approach to “Explanation-Seeking Curiosity” (ESC): the state that motivates people to seek an explanation. If ESC tends to prompt explanation search when doing so is likely to be beneficial, we can use prior work on the functional consequences of explanation search to derive “forward-looking” candidate triggers of ESC—those that concern expectations about the downstream consequences of pursuing explanation search. Across three studies (N = 867), we test hypotheses derived from this functional approach. In Studies 1–3, we find that ESC is most strongly predicted by expectations about future learning and future utility. We also find that judgments of novelty, surprise, and information gap predict ESC, consistent with prior work on curiosity; however, the role for forward-looking considerations is not reducible to these factors. In Studies 2–3, we find that predictors of ESC form three clusters, expectations about learning (about the target of explanation), expectations about export (to other cases and future contexts), and backward-looking considerations (having to do with the relationship between the target of explanation and prior knowledge). Additionally, these clusters are consistent across stimulus sets that probe ESC, but not fact-seeking curiosity. These findings suggest that explanation-seeking curiosity is aroused in a systematic way, and that people are not only sensitive to the match or mismatch between a given stimulus and their current or former beliefs, but to how they expect an explanation for that stimulus to improve their epistemic state.
KW - Causal attribution
KW - Curiosity
KW - Explanation
KW - Exploration
KW - Question-asking
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U2 - 10.1016/j.cogpsych.2020.101276
DO - 10.1016/j.cogpsych.2020.101276
M3 - Article
C2 - 32062087
AN - SCOPUS:85079245635
SN - 0010-0285
VL - 119
JO - Cognitive Psychology
JF - Cognitive Psychology
M1 - 101276
ER -