An Investigation of the Physiological Basis of Curiosity in Young Children and Adults

所有发展阶段的人类都表现出普遍的好奇心驱动行为，以寻求和获取新信息。从很小的时候起，婴儿就对环境中的新奇事物很敏感，他们会通过眼睛和身体积极地、不断地探索周围的环境。成年人在没有明显动机的情况下花时间读书、玩猜谜和测验以及其他寻求信息的活动（例如，八卦）。在好奇心的驱使下，科学家们开始探索未知的世界。他们潜入地球上最深的海洋，揭开深海的奥秘，并发明了探索火星未知空间的好奇号火星车。好奇心作为一种对知识的内在需求，不仅促进和塑造了人类的认知发展，而且扩大了我们的知识边界，激发了创新和发现。作为认知发展的关键驱动力，好奇心促进探索、促进学习和增强记忆。许多研究表明，这种增强效应的原因包括先验知识、好奇心预期和好奇心解决。例如，当好奇心被一个可能有所了解的未解决的测试所激发时，对测试答案的预期和测试答案（即好奇心解决）被认为是推进学习的关键。换句话说，好奇心被激发的程度取决于个体的先验知识，而好奇心一旦被激发，就可能产生一种期待的状态，为学习者建立一种“准备学习”的学习模式，激励学习者去探索和寻求信息。我的博士论文的关键发现确实表明，好奇心的激发与某种唤醒机制（“准备学习”模式）有关，从而对学习产生增强作用，特别是对幼儿。最重要的是，这一发现提出了一些尚未得到充分研究的问题，即生理唤醒和发育变化在好奇心驱动的学习中的作用。好奇心的衡量标准包括成年人的自我报告、婴儿对屏幕上刺激的注视时间、瞳孔大小的变化以及大脑对经验信息的特定反应。为了理解整个发展过程和成年人的好奇心，需要新的方法和分析技能。因此，在本次Fellowship中，我将运用这些方法并学习新的方法进行后续研究，重点考察生理基础的作用，探索幼儿和成人好奇心驱动学习的发展变化。更具体地说，这个项目将涉及眼球追踪、瞳孔测量和动作捕捉测量，通过应用多方法方法来封装好奇心的基本机制，为我未来的ESRC新研究者申请提供概念证明的证据，为该领域提供了一个新的方向。除了拟议的项目，在奖学金期间，我将通过会议演讲、同行评审出版物、lay摘要以及面向早期从业人员和公众的外展活动，向学术和非学术受众传播我的发现，以产生区域、国家和全球影响。该奖学金旨在提高人们对好奇心在认知和教育中的作用的认识，弥合研究，实践和公众之间的差距，增加我的研究的实际影响。

Humans across all developmental stages exhibit pervasive curiosity-driven behaviours to seek and acquire new information. From very early on in life, young infants are sensitive to novelty in their environment and they actively and constantly explore their surroundings through their eyes and body. Adults spend time reading books, engaging with puzzles and quizzes as well as other information- seeking activities (e.g., gossip) without apparent incentives. Driven by curiosity, scientists take expeditions to discover the unknown. They dive into the deepest ocean on earth to unravel mysteries of the deep sea and have invented the Curiosity Rover for exploring the unknown space on Mars. Curiosity as an inner need for knowledge not only facilitates and shapes human cognitive development but also expands our knowledge boundaries and inspires innovation and discovery. As a key driver of cognitive development, curiosity promotes exploration, boosts learning and enhances memory. Much research suggests a few reasons for this enhancing effect including prior knowledge, curiosity anticipation and curiosity resolution. For example, when curiosity is piqued by an unsolved quiz that one might know something about, the anticipation of the answer to the quiz and the answer to the quiz (i.e., curiosity resolution) are thought to be crucial in advancing learning. In other words, the degree to which curiosity is elicited depends on an individual's prior knowledge, and once curiosity is elicited, it may create a state of anticipation, setting up a 'ready-to-learn' mode for a learner to learn, motivating the learner to explore and seek information.The key finding of my PhD thesis indeed shows that curiosity elicitation is associated with a certain arousal mechanism (the 'ready-to-learn' mode), resulting in an enhancing effect on learning, especially in young children. Most importantly, this finding has raised under-researched questions about the roles of physiological arousal and developmental change in curiosity-driven learning. Curiosity has been measured by adults' self-reporting, by infants' looking time to stimuli on a screen, by changes in pupil size, and specific brain responses to experienced information. To understand curiosity across development and in adults, new methods and analysis skills are needed. Therefore, in this Fellowship, I will apply these methods and learn new ones to conduct a follow-on study, focusing on examining the role of the physiological basis and exploring the developmental changes in curiosity-driven learning in young children and adults. More specifically, this project will involve eye-tracking, pupillometry and motion capture measures, providing a novel direction in the field by applying a multimethod approach to encapsulate the basic mechanism of curiosity, offering proof-of-concept evidence in my future ESRC New Investigator grant application.Alongside the proposed project, during the Fellowship I will disseminate my findings to academic and non-academic audiences through conference presentations, peer-reviewed publications, lay summaries as well as outreach events for early-years practitioners and the public to generate regional, national and global impacts. The Fellowship will seek to raise awareness of the role of curiosity in cognition and education, bridging the gap between research, practice and the public, increasing the practical impacts of my research.