What Pushes Us To Learn More? What We Think We Know, But Maybe Not

If you think you know the farm animal related to T-Rex, or the American president who inspired the creation of blue jelly candies, but you're not entirely sure, you're more likely to catch up with the chicken. The connection of dinosaurs or Ronald Reagan's predilection for glazed candies and gel fillings.

This is because our doubts about what we know arouse our curiosity and can motivate us to learn more, according to new research from the University of California, Berkeley.

The findings, which were published online in the journal Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, question the popular belief that curiosity in general is the main driver of knowledge acquisition. They also give a new meaning to the Montessori approach to preparation for learning, which encourages children to follow their own natural curiosity.

"It is very fashionable to talk about curiosity as a strategy to increase learning, but it is not clear how to attract people's curiosity," said the study's lead author, Celeste Kidd, an assistant professor of psychology at UC Berkeley. "Our study suggests that it is uncertainty - when you think you know something and discover that you do not know it - that leads to greater curiosity and learning."

Practical applications include adapting learning in the classroom to students' misconceptions about what they know.

"Asking students to explain how things work can be an effective learning intervention because it makes them aware of what they do not know and they are curious about what they need to know," said the study's co-lead author, Shirlene Wade. Visiting Ph.D. scholar at Kidd's psychology lab at UC Berkeley.

For example, if students are asked what causes climate change, how a bicycle works or about the separation of constitutional powers from the United States, and realize that they only have a partial understanding of how these things work, they will stimulate their curiosity and be more open to learning, if only to do well next time.

Meanwhile, topics that we do not know anything about, or too much, can cause disinterest or even boredom.

Take "Game of Thrones", the successful medieval fantasy television series. If you are a super fan and predicted, erroneously, that Sansa would end up on the Iron Throne, you are more likely to check all the characters in the program and twist the arguments to see what was lost.

If you were the showrunner, on the other hand, you would not have reason to be curious. And if you stayed out the full eight seasons, you just would not mind.

"Curiosity is the guardian of the knowledge we choose to absorb, and that includes information about 'Game of Thrones,'" Kidd said.

For the study, 87 adults across the country, recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk, a crowdsourcing platform, were interrogated online for about an hour on 100 trivial questions.

In the learning phase of the experiment, each study participant made their best estimate in response to each trivial question, and if they thought their answer was correct.

They also rated on a scale of 1 to 7 how close they thought their answers were to be accurate and how curious they were to find the right answer. Then, the participants were shown the answer to the trivial question for five seconds and asked to rate their level of surprise.

By: Preeti Narula

Content: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/05/190523161150.htm