METACURIO · What makes us curious? The role of metacognition.
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2019-09-01 → 2021-08-31
- EU contribution
- €175,572
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF-EF-ST
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Results in brief
What makes us curious? The role of metacognition.
This project addressed the question of the determinants of human curiosity. Curiosity is a basic biological drive that motivates learning and guides decision-making. Despite its ubiquitous influence over our daily lives, we have a very limited understanding of its function, mechanisms and neural basis. In the current project, several aspects were investigated to better understand the causes and consequences of curiosity and information-seeking behavior. The overall goal of this project was to determine how metacognitive processes modulate curiosity. To accomplish this, we planned to combine experimental, computational and neuroimaging techniques in order to determine how metacognitive processes shape curiosity. First, we found that information-seeking behavior is spontaneously biased towards regularities in the environment. We further found that the attentional bias effect diminished with continued exposure to the regularities. This highlights a spontaneous bias of attention towards task-irrelevant regularities that is transient, and proposes that learning of regularities may play a key role in moderating information seeking behavior. Second, we examined the relationship between risk, ambiguity and curiosity. We assessed this question by designing a novel experiment, in which people were asked to indicate their desire to know the outcome of an uncertain event, while manipulating these factors independently. The results showed that while curiosity was strongly related to risk, showing linear increases in curiosity with increasing entropy, there was no additional variance explained in curiosity by ambiguity. This is an important building block and finding for understanding the determinants of human curiosity. Finally, we examined curiosity in a learning context, in which participants were provided with small samples of information and asked to form hypotheses about the underlying generative model that produces the samples. The work carried out during this project has had (and is having) substantial impact on the field of curiosity and information-seeking, in elucidating the behavioral and computational mechanisms of curiosity, and how it is shaped by various external and internal (metacognitive) factors. Our findings have important implications for diverse fields such as learning, decisionmaking, and robotics. A better understanding of curiosity and metacognition may also have important implications for the education sector, as both of these mechanisms have been implicated as important predictors of academic success.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
Curiosity is a basic biological drive that has a profound influence on our behaviour, choices and learning. Despite the vital role it plays in our daily lives, its functions, mechanisms and neural basis remain poorly understood. It has been proposed that the intensity of curiosity for certain information is tightly linked to the ability of that information to reduce uncertainty, thereby closing the gap between what is currently known and what is yet to be discovered. This project proposes that the ability to monitor one’s levels of knowledge and uncertainty (metacognition), is critical to the effective deployment of curiosity. The goal of this project is to unravel how metacognitive processing modulates curiosity. The relationship between metacognition and curiosity will first be systematically probed in a behavioural experiment that will investigate this relationship in both a learning and decision-making context. Computational modelling will further elucidate these relationships, and help to inform a theoretical model of curiosity as a metacognitive process. The cutting-edge decoded neurofeedback approach will then be used to selectively disrupt metacognition and curiosity in order to establish a causal relationship and determine the directionality of the effects. This project will be the first to combine experimental, neural and computational approaches to unravel the dynamics of the relationship between metacognition and curiosity. This integrative approach will result in a unified theoretical and mechanistic account of curiosity, which will provide a strong foundation for future research in this field. The findings will have far-reaching implications for diverse fields such as learning, decision-making, and robotics. A better understanding of curiosity and metacognition will also have important implications for the education sector, as both of these mechanisms have been implicated as important predictors of academic success.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- STICHTING RADBOUD UNIVERSITEIT · NijmegenCoordinatorNetherlands
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union