Knowledge in Sight: Toddlers Plan Efficient Epistemic Actions by Anticipating Learning Gains

Curiosity and the dynamics of optimal exploration

What drives our curiosity remains an elusive and hotly debated issue, with multiple hypotheses proposed but a cohesive account yet to be established. This review discusses traditional and emergent theories that frame curiosity as a desire to know and a drive to learn, respectively. We adopt a model-based approach that maps the temporal dynamics of various factors underlying curiosity-based exploration, such as uncertainty, information gain, and learning progress. In so doing, we identify the limitations of past theories and posit an integrated account that harnesses their strengths in describing curiosity as a tool for optimal environmental exploration. In our unified account, curiosity serves as a 'common currency' for exploration, which must be balanced with other drives such as safety and hunger to achieve efficient action.

Curiosity as a metacognitive feeling

Curious information-seeking is known to be a key driver for learning, but characterizing this important psychological phenomenon remains a challenge. In this article, we argue that solving this challenge requires qualifying the relationships between metacognition and curiosity. The idea that curiosity is a metacognitive competence has been resisted: researchers have assumed both that young children and non-human animals can be genuinely curious, and that metacognition requires conceptual and culturally situated resources that are unavailable to young children and non-human animals. Here, we argue that this resistance is unwarranted given accumulating evidence that metacognition can be deployed procedurally, and we defend the view that curiosity is a metacognitive feeling. Our metacognitive view singles out two monitoring steps as a triggering condition for curiosity: evaluating one's own informational needs, and predicting the likelihood that explorations of the proximate environment afford significant information gains. We review empirical evidence and computational models of curiosity, and show that they fit well with this metacognitive account, while on the contrary, they remain difficult to explain by a competing account according to which curiosity is a basic attitude of questioning. Finally, we propose a new way to construe the relationships between curiosity and the human-specific communicative practice of questioning, discuss the issue of how children may learn to express their curiosity through interactions with others, and conclude by briefly exploring the implications of our proposal for educational practices.