The Effects of Curiosity on Learning and Memory among Younger and Older Adults

好奇心是人类发现的核心。虽然好奇心在指导学习中的重要性已经被直观地理解了，但对于它在促进记忆方面所起的作用，科学上却知之甚少。现有的许多研究都集中在好奇心如何在儿童时期和非人类动物中加强探索，强调好奇心作为改善认知的动机的进化价值。然而，关于好奇心如何在老年人的学习中发挥作用的信息很少。我们知识中的这一关键差距表明，现有模型在整个生命周期内动机和认知之间的相互作用方面存在局限性。在接下来的五年里，我将根据我在学习和记忆方面与年龄相关的变化研究的经验来解决这一差距。通过利用最近对基于好奇心的学习的神经生物学描述，我预测老年人将表现出好奇心和记忆力之间较弱的关系。具体地说，我将考察好奇心的年龄差异是否有助于：(1)学习暂时令人困惑的信息(知觉好奇心)，或(2)学习你想知道的信息(认知性好奇心)。我还将探索激发好奇心是否能帮助缩小记忆力的年龄差异(3)。我将使用行为范式在学习过程中诱发好奇心，并研究它与后来对图像、单词和事实的回忆的关系。在从事这项研究的过程中，我将为丰富好奇心的理论和开发可用于客观评估好奇心的方法做出贡献。这项研究还将代表着对正常衰老过程中好奇心的首次系统研究，鉴于最近的证据表明，基于好奇心的学习依赖于已知会因衰老而受损的大脑区域，这是一项重要的工作。更广泛地说，这项工作将帮助我们理解一个关键的动机，因为它在日常生活中无处不在，我们认为它是理所当然的。拟议中的研究计划还将使我能够启动一个活跃的记忆和衰老实验室，吸引希望接受这两种官方语言培训的国内和国际新秀科学家，重申加拿大是创新认知研究的地点。

Curiosity is at the heart of human discovery. Although the importance of curiosity in guiding learning is intuitively understood, there is little scientific understanding of the role that it plays in promoting memory. Much of the existing research has focused on how curiosity potentiates exploration in childhood and among non-human animals, highlighting its evolutionary value as a motivational drive to improve cognition. Yet, there is a paucity of information on how curiosity is leveraged in service of learning in older adulthood. This critical gap in our knowledge points to limitations in existing models on the interplay between motivation and cognition across the lifespan. Over the next five years, I will build on my experience in the study of age-related changes in learning and memory to resolve this gap. By leveraging recent neurobiological accounts of curiosity-based learning, I predict that older adults will display a weaker relationship between curiosity and memory. Specifically, I will examine age differences in curiosity as a function of whether it serves to: (1) learn information that is temporarily perplexing (perceptual curiosity), or (2) learn information that you want to know (epistemic curiosity). I will also explore whether kindling curiosity can help minimize age difference in memory (3). I will use behavioural paradigms to induce curiosity during learning, and examine its relationship to later recall of images, words, and facts. In pursuing this research, I will contribute to the theoretical enrichment of curiosity and the development of methodologies that can be used to assess it objectively. This research would also represent the first systematic examination of curiosity in normal aging, an important undertaking given that recent evidence shows curiosity-based learning to hinge on brain areas known to be compromised by aging. More broadly, this work will help us understand a critical motivation that we take for granted due to its ubiquity in everyday life. The proposed program of research will also allow me to kick-start an active memory and aging lab that will attract budding national and international scientists looking to train in either official language, reaffirming Canada as a site for innovative cognitive research.