The Multifaceted Role of Self-Generated Question Asking in Curiosity-Driven Learning.

Curiosity motivates the search for missing information, driving learning, scientific discovery, and innovation. Yet, identifying that there is a gap in one's knowledge is itself a critical step, and may demand that one formulate a question to precisely express what is missing. Our work captures the integral role of self-generated questions during the acquisition of new information, which we refer to as active-curiosity-driven learning. We tested active-curiosity-driven learning using our "Curiosity Question & Answer Task" paradigm, where participants (N=135) were asked to generate questions in response to novel, incomplete factual statements and provided the opportunity to forage for answers. We also introduce new measures of question quality that express how well questions capture stimulus and foraging information. We hypothesized that active question asking should influence behavior across the stages of our task by increasing the probability that participants express curiosity, forage for answers, and remember what they had thereby discovered. We found that individuals who asked a high number of quality questions experienced elevated curiosity, were more likely to pursue missing information that was semantically related to their questions, and more likely to retain the information on a later cued recall test. Additional analyses revealed that curiosity played a predominant role in motivating participants to forage for missing information, and that both curiosity and satisfaction with the acquired information boosted memory recall. Overall, our results suggest that asking questions enhances the value of missing information, with important implications for learning and discovery of all forms.

Capturing, clarifying, and consolidating the curiosity-creativity connection.

The cognitive-motivational concepts of curiosity and creativity are often viewed as intertwined. Yet, despite the intuitively strong linkage between these two concepts, the existing cognitive-behavioral evidence for a curiosity-creativity connection is not strong, and is nearly entirely based on self-report measures. Using a new lab-based Curiosity Q&A task we evaluate to what extent behaviorally manifested curiosity-as revealed in autonomous inquiry and exploration-is associated with creative performance. In a preregistered study (N = 179) we show that, as hypothesized, the novelty of the questions that participants generated during the Curiosity Q&A Task significantly positively correlated with the originality of their responses on a divergent-thinking task (the conceptually-based Alternative Uses Task). Additionally, the extent to which participants sought out information that was implicitly missing in the presented factual stimuli ("gap-related information foraging") positively correlated with performance on two predominantly convergent-thinking tasks (the Remote Associates Task and Analogy Completion). Question asking, topic-related information foraging, and creative performance correlated with trait-based "interest-type" curiosity oriented toward exploration and novelty, but not with "deprivation-type" curiosity focused on dispelling uncertainty or ignorance. Theoretically and practically, these results underscore the importance of continuing to develop interventions that foster both creative thinking and active autonomous inquiry.