CAREER: Investigating Curiosity-Driven Visual Processing during Science Learning

职业：研究科学学习过程中好奇心驱动的视觉处理

• 批准号: 2239591
• 负责人: Emily Peterson
• 金额: $ 138.77万
• 依托单位: American University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2023
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2023-07-01 至 2028-06-30
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2239591&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: CAREER; Investigating; Curiosity; Driven; Visual

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.

该项目将调查好奇心在学生学习科学现象中所发挥的作用。好奇心是科学发现的标志，可以促使学生提出问题，探索科学思想，增强记忆力，并在学习过程中提高持久性。然而，关于好奇心的研究大多集中在好奇心是否会促进学习，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，该项目将对高中和本科生进行一组三项研究，以测试激发对科学现象的好奇心是否会改变学生的视觉处理。这些实验将测试好奇心是否会改变视觉处理，以支持学生学习科学。该项目还将开发公民科学项目，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处理，为未来的干预措施提供建议，以增加好奇心的积极影响，并将是第一个在科学学习过程中研究好奇心和视觉处理之间的关系。该项目由EHR核心研究（ECR）计划授予美国大学的CAREER奖支持，该计划支持推进STEM学习基础研究文献的工作。在教育研究中，很明显，动机过程（如好奇心）和认知过程（如视觉空间思维）都支持学生在STEM领域的学习。动机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，教育中的实证研究尚未最大限度地发挥认知科学方法（如眼动追踪）的潜力来阐明这些关系，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），以调查学习过程中的动机/情感和认知的交叉点。因此，这个项目的中心问题是：当学生使用视觉来学习科学现象时，好奇心如何塑造视觉处理？为了研究这个问题，本项目将进行一系列眼动追踪和行为研究，以研究好奇心调节视觉处理的认知相关性的具体方式。在这些研究中，高中生和本科生将使用地图和图表等视觉材料学习科学现象。研究1将使用提问干预来实验性地操纵好奇心。研究2和3将研究好奇心的受试者内波动，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。作为涉及好奇心驱动的奖励处理的大脑区域（即，多巴胺能回路）也与一系列视觉过程有关，包括视觉信息寻求和心理意象的形成，本项目将这些视觉过程作为潜在的中介，以解释为什么学生在感到好奇时学习得更好。由于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，因此拟议的研究将为科学学习任务的类型提供具体建议，这些任务将从支持好奇心中受益最多。例如，知道好奇心通过支持视觉信息寻求而不是通过增强心理意象来影响学习（或反之亦然），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和培养好奇心有影响-该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并被认为是值得的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来提供支持。