Minimally counterintuitive stimuli trigger greater curiosity than merely improbable stimuli

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Developmental Psychology
• Cognitive Science of Religion

Background:

• Curiosity drives lifelong learning and is triggered by expectation violations.
• Previous research indicates both children and adults experience heightened curiosity due to unexpected events.
• The specific nature and degree of expectation violations that maximize curiosity, and how this changes with age, remain unclear.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate whether minimally counterintuitive (MCI) stimuli, defined as having a single violation of an intuitive theory, are particularly effective at eliciting curiosity.
• To explore how the relationship between the degree of surprisingness and curiosity varies across development.
• To test the hypothesis that MCI stimuli are more curiosity-inducing than merely unlikely stimuli.

Main Methods:

• Participants (77 adults, 36 4- and 5-year-olds) were presented with stimuli categorized as ordinary, unlikely, MCI, or very counterintuitive (VCI).
• Participants indicated which stimulus they were most interested in learning more about.
• A forced-choice paradigm was used to compare preferences between different categories of stimuli.

Main Results:

• Adults and 5-year-olds showed a preference for learning about unlikely stimuli over ordinary ones.
• Both adults and 5-year-olds preferred MCI stimuli over unlikely ones.
• There was no significant preference for VCI stimuli over MCI stimuli, suggesting diminishing returns for surprisingness.

Conclusions:

• Minimally counterintuitive stimuli are more effective at triggering curiosity than merely unlikely stimuli.
• The effect of surprisingness on curiosity appears to follow a pattern of diminishing returns.
• Sensitivity to surprisingness as a curiosity trigger increases with age, emerging by age 5 in this study.