Curiosity Leads to Better Memory After a Delay

• In Event: 2-105 - The Child as an Active Learner: Influences of Social-models, Curiosity, Strategy, and Executive Function

Integrative Statement

Curiosity is an enduring quality of the human mind. It has been studied empirically for more than a century yet researchers have only recently begun to ask questions about the function(s) curiosity serves (Kidd & Hayden, 2015). Recent evidence suggests states of curiosity facilitate long-term potentiation in the hippocampus: people remember more of the information they are curious about. Although the relationship between curiosity and memory is well documented in adult samples (Gruber, Gelman, & Ranganath, 2014; Marvin & Shohamy, 2016; Murayama & Kuhbandner, 2011), very little research has investigated curiosity’s memory-enhancing role in developmental samples.

School-age children are capable of engaging in sophisticated exploratory behaviors. Four and five-year-old children can monitor the sources of their knowledge and make fewer source monitoring errors when they accurately remember facts learned from those sources (Bemis, Leichtman, & Pillemer, 2013). Around this same age, children can also monitor their knowledge and express judgments about their ‘feeling-of-knowing’ (Cultice, Somerville, & Wellman, 1983) and the accuracy of children’s ‘feeling-of-knowing’ judgements increases with age (Wellman, 1977). Together, these findings suggest that school-age children are capable of monitoring their own knowledge and altering their behavior to acquire the information they desire. Based on these findings we hypothesize that school-age children are capable of monitoring their knowledge states and selectively attending to information they are curious about.

In this paper, we present evidence suggesting that 7- to 8-year-old children recruited from public schools and museums in the San Francisco Bay Area are capable of selectively attending to and remembering declarative information. In two experiments, we present children with a subset of trivia questions which were previously piloted to ensure that most children in this age group would not already know the answers to the trivia questions. After presenting the children with sets of six questions, the experimenter then asked the child to rate the questions based on how curious they were to know the answer. Once this process was completed twice, the experimenter then asked the child each of the trivia questions and recorded their response. Our results suggest that children’s recall was unaffected by curiosity rating when presented with an immediate recall test (Experiment 1). In Experiment 2 we introduced a delay task designed to prevent children from rehearsing the trivia question answers. Results revealed better recall for high curiosity questions compared to low curiosity answers after the delay task suggesting that delay results in a loss of memory for low interest information. Follow up research is currently being conducted with a longer delay to investigate curiosity’s effect on children’s long-term memory.

Our findings suggest that the benefit of curiosity for learning and memory comes from retaining information for which children are curiosity and forgetting information for which they are not curious. As active learners, children must decide what in their environment is relevant and important to their learning goals. Curiosity aids this process by helping children sort through all of the information they have access to in order to retain what they finding interested and important.

Authors

• Ella G. Simmons, University of California, Berkeley
  Non-Presenting Author

• Shaun O’Grady, University of California, Berkeley
  Presenting Author

• Fei Xu, University of California-Berkeley
  Non-Presenting Author