CAREER: Investigating Curiosity-Driven Visual Processing during Science Learning

这个项目将探讨好奇心在学生学习科学现象中的作用。好奇心是科学发现的一个标志，它可以推动学生提出问题，探索科学思想，增强记忆力，并在学习过程中增强毅力。然而，对好奇心的研究主要集中在好奇心是否能促进学习，而不是好奇心如何促进学习。因此，为了了解好奇心如何影响对科学现象的学习，本项目将对高中生和本科生进行一组三个研究，以测试对科学现象的好奇心是否会改变学生的视觉加工。这些实验将测试好奇的感觉是否会以支持学生学习科学的方式改变视觉处理。该项目还将发展公民科学项目，让K-12学生参与关于好奇心和视觉处理的认知科学研究。该项目的结果将有助于理解好奇心和视觉加工，为未来的干预措施提供建议，以增加好奇心的积极影响，并将是第一个研究科学学习过程中好奇心和视觉加工之间关系的研究。该项目得到了EHR核心研究（ECR）项目颁发给美国大学的CAREER奖的支持，该项目支持推进STEM学习基础研究文献的工作。在教育研究中，很明显，好奇心等动机过程和视觉空间思维等认知过程都支持学生在STEM领域的学习。动机过程和认知过程之间的潜在关系在理论层面上得到了很好的阐述。然而，教育领域的实证研究尚未最大限度地利用眼动追踪等认知科学方法来阐明这些关系，认知科学研究倾向于利用领域一般刺激（例如，琐事事实、面孔）来研究学习过程中动机/情感和认知的交集。因此，这个项目的核心问题是：当学生使用视觉来学习科学现象时，好奇心是如何塑造视觉处理的？为了研究这个问题，本项目将进行一组眼动追踪和行为研究，以研究好奇心调节视觉加工认知相关的具体方式。在这些研究中，高中生和本科生将学习使用地图和图表等视觉效果来了解科学现象。研究1将实验性地使用提问干预来操纵好奇心。研究2和研究3将考察学科内部好奇心的波动，因为学生接触到旨在激发或解决好奇心的科学现象的视觉效果。由于与好奇心驱动的奖励处理（即多巴胺能回路）相关的大脑区域也与一系列视觉过程（包括视觉信息寻求和心理意象形成）有关，该项目将把这些视觉过程作为潜在的中介来解释为什么学生在感到好奇时学得更好。因为这些发现将提供关于好奇心如何（而不仅仅是是否）支持科学学习的见解，拟议的研究将产生对科学学习任务类型的具体建议，这些任务将从支持好奇心中获益最多。例如，知道好奇心对学习的影响是通过支持视觉信息寻找而不是通过增强心理意象（反之亦然）来实现的，这对确定可能从促进好奇心的教学中获益最多的教育任务类型，以及开发在支持潜在过程中最有效的促进好奇心的干预措施具有重要意义。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This project will investigate the role that curiosity plays in students’ learning about scientific phenomena. Curiosity is a hallmark of scientific discovery and can propel students to ask questions, explore scientific ideas, enhance memory, and boost persistence during learning. Yet, studies of curiosity have mostly focused on whether curiosity increases learning rather than how curiosity increases learning. Therefore, to understand how curiosity impacts learning about scientific phenomena, this project will conduct a set of three studies with high school and undergraduate students to test whether sparking curiosity about scientific phenomena changes students’ visual processing. These experiments will test whether feeling curious changes visual processing in ways that support student learning about science. This project will also develop citizen science projects to engage K-12 students in cognitive science research about curiosity and visual processing. Results from this project will contribute to understandings of curiosity and visual processing, provide recommendations for future interventions to increase the positive impact of curiosity, and will be the first to examine relations between curiosity and visual processing during science learning. The project is supported by a CAREER award to American University by the EHR Core Research (ECR) program, which supports work that advances the fundamental research literature on STEM learning.Within educational research, it is clear that both motivational processes, such as curiosity, and cognitive processes, such as visual-spatial thinking, support student learning across STEM fields. The potential relations among motivational and cognitive processes are well-articulated at the theoretical level. However, empirical research studies in education have not yet maximized the potential for cognitive science methods such as eye-tracking to elucidate these relations, and cognitive science research has tended to utilize domain-general stimuli (e.g., trivia facts, faces) to investigate intersection of motivation/emotion and cognition during learning. Therefore, the central question of this project is: How does curiosity shape visual processing when students use visuals to learn about scientific phenomena? To investigate this question, this project will conduct a set of eye-tracking and behavioral studies to investigate the specific ways curiosity modulates cognitive correlates of visual processing. In these studies, high school and undergraduate students will learn about scientific phenomena using visuals such as maps and diagrams. Study 1 will experimentally manipulate curiosity using a question-asking intervention. Studies 2 and 3 will examine within-subject fluctuations in curiosity as students are exposed to visuals about scientific phenomena designed to spark or resolve curiosity. As brain regions implicated in curiosity-driven reward processing (i.e., dopaminergic circuits) are also associated with a range of visual processes including visual information-seeking and mental imagery formation, this project will target these visual processes as potential mediators to explain why students learn better when they feel curious. Because these findings will provide insight into how (rather than just whether) curiosity supports learning about science, the proposed research will generate specific recommendations for the types of science learning tasks that would benefit most from supporting curiosity. Knowing that, for instance, curiosity impacts learning by supporting visual information seeking more than by enhancing mental imagery (or vice versa), has implications for identifying the types of educational tasks that may benefit most from curiosity-promoting instruction and for developing curiosity-promoting interventions that are maximally effective in supporting the underlying processes.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.