Surprise, Curiosity, and Confusion Promote Knowledge Exploration: Evidence for Robust Effects of Epistemic Emotions

Adults Show Positive Moral Evaluations of Curiosity About Religion

Four experiments investigated the perceived virtue of curiosity about religion. Adults from the United States made moral judgments regarding targets who exhibited curiosity, possessed relevant knowledge, or lacked both curiosity and knowledge about religion and comparison topics (e.g., science). Participants attributed greater moral goodness to targets who displayed curiosity compared with targets who were ignorant or knowledgeable about the domain. This preference was consistent across Jewish, Protestant, Catholic, and other Christian participants but was absent when atheists evaluated religious curiosity. Perceptions of effort partially mediated judgments: Participants viewed curious characters as exerting more effort and consequently rated them as more moral. To test causality, we manipulated perceptions of effort and showed that participants viewed curious characters who exerted effort as particularly moral. This work fosters novel insights into the perceived virtue of curiosity and further illuminates similarities and differences between religious and scientific cognition.

An untapped potential: Curiosity in medical school

BACKGROUND

There seems to be a common perception among medical educators that curiosity is untapped or even subjugated in medical education. This review aims to summarize research on curiosity across the fields of psychology, neuroscience, and education and report its potential to advance medical education.

METHODS

For this narrative review multiple online libraries were searched using variations of the terms curiosity and school/education/learning. Additional studies were reviewed using the reference lists of included studies, and all studies were assessed for quality and relevance.

RESULTS

This review of previous research on curiosity shows that curiosity can significantly impact characteristics relevant to medical education, particularly mental health and learning. In addition, the authors outline how curiosity is linked to other epistemic emotions such as anxiety, novelty, surprise, and uncertainty. Finally, an epistemic-emotion-framework (EEF) is proposed to help educators encourage curiosity in medical students.

CONCLUSION

By drawing from other research fields, medical educators can learn valuable lessons about the importance of curiosity and how to influence it. This review provides an overview of current research and a framework for how the potential of curiosity can be harnessed to play an important role in students' medical education.

Invoking and identifying task-oriented interlocutor confusion in human-robot interaction

Successful conversational interaction with a social robot requires not only an assessment of a user's contribution to an interaction, but also awareness of their emotional and attitudinal states as the interaction unfolds. To this end, our research aims to systematically trigger, but then interpret human behaviors to track different states of potential user confusion in interaction so that systems can be primed to adjust their policies in light of users entering confusion states. In this paper, we present a detailed human-robot interaction study to prompt, investigate, and eventually detect confusion states in users. The study itself employs a Wizard-of-Oz (WoZ) style design with a Pepper robot to prompt confusion states for task-oriented dialogues in a well-defined manner. The data collected from 81 participants includes audio and visual data, from both the robot's perspective and the environment, as well as participant survey data. From these data, we evaluated the correlations of induced confusion conditions with multimodal data, including eye gaze estimation, head pose estimation, facial emotion detection, silence duration time, and user speech analysis-including emotion and pitch analysis. Analysis shows significant differences of participants' behaviors in states of confusion based on these signals, as well as a strong correlation between confusion conditions and participants own self-reported confusion scores. The paper establishes strong correlations between confusion levels and these observable features, and lays the ground or a more complete social and affect oriented strategy for task-oriented human-robot interaction. The contributions of this paper include the methodology applied, dataset, and our systematic analysis.

Curiosity, Surprise, and the Recall of Tobacco-Related Health Information in Adolescents

A key goal of health communications designed to prevent smoking initiation during adolescence is for the tobacco-related information to be retained in memory beyond immediate message exposure. Here, we test the role for epistemic emotions, specifically curiosity and surprise, in facilitating memory for tobacco-related health information. Participants (n = 294 never-smoking adolescents, ages 14-16 years) performed a trivia guessing task wherein they guessed the answers to general trivia and smoking-related trivia questions. A subset of participants (n = 154) completed a surprise trivia memory task one week later and answered the previously viewed questions. Results indicate that curiosity about the answers to smoking-related trivia is associated with more accurate recall of smoking-related trivia answers one week later. Surprise also facilitated memory for smoking-related trivia, but the association was limited to cases where confidence in prior knowledge was low. Indeed, when participants had high confidence in their prior knowledge, surprise about the answer to trivia questions was associated with worse recall. Findings suggest that engendering states of curiosity for smoking-related information may facilitate retention of that information in never-smoking adolescents and highlight the need to examine both surprise and confidence in health communications to avoid low message recall.

National Experiences and Trust in China's National Government Among Hong Kong Chinese Youth

Trust in the national central government is particularly imperative for promotion in outlying regions, such as by enhancing their residents' national cultural and territorial experiences. The contributions of such experiences, albeit grounded on contact and cultural theories, require empirical investigation. Such investigation engaged a survey of 2277 Chinese youths aged 18-29 years in Hong Kong, an outlying region returning to China's sovereignty. Results evidenced that experience with Mainland Chinese territory in the Greater Bay Area during junior secondary schooling predicted recent trust in China's national government, particularly in those born in Hong Kong. Meanwhile, the cultural experience of Chinese enculturation during schooling predicted the trust conditionally with migrant status or the territorial experience. These results imply the value of enhancing national cultural and territorial experiences to promote youth's trust in the central government.

Confused or not: decoding brain activity and recognizing confusion in reasoning learning using EEG

Objective.Confusion is the primary epistemic emotion in the learning process, influencing students' engagement and whether they become frustrated or bored. However, research on confusion in learning is still in its early stages, and there is a need to better understand how to recognize it and what electroencephalography (EEG) signals indicate its occurrence. The present work investigates confusion during reasoning learning using EEG, and aims to fill this gap with a multidisciplinary approach combining educational psychology, neuroscience and computer science.Approach.First, we design an experiment to actively and accurately induce confusion in reasoning. Second, we propose a subjective and objective joint labeling technique to address the label noise issue. Third, to confirm that the confused state can be distinguished from the non-confused state, we compare and analyze the mean band power of confused and unconfused states across five typical bands. Finally, we present an EEG database for confusion analysis, together with benchmark results from conventional (Naive Bayes, Support Vector Machine, Random Forest, and Artificial Neural Network) and end-to-end (Long Short Term Memory, Residual Network, and EEGNet) machine learning methods.Main results.Findings revealed: 1. Significant differences in the power of delta, theta, alpha, beta and lower gamma between confused and non-confused conditions; 2. A higher attentional and cognitive load when participants were confused; and 3. The Random Forest algorithm with time-domain features achieved a high accuracy/F1 score (88.06%/0.88 for the subject-dependent approach and 84.43%/0.84 for the subject-independent approach) in the binary classification of the confused and non-confused states.Significance.The study advances our understanding of confusion and provides practical insights for recognizing and analyzing it in the learning process. It extends existing theories on the differences between confused and non-confused states during learning and contributes to the cognitive-affective model. The research enables researchers, educators, and practitioners to monitor confusion, develop adaptive systems, and test recognition approaches.

Schizotypy unfolding into the night? Schizotypal traits and daytime psychotic-like experiences predict negative and salient dreams

Symptoms of insomnia and frequent nightmares are prevalent in psychotic disorders, and are associated with psychotic-like experiences (PLEs) in the non-clinical population. Whereas the role of impaired sleep in psychosis was extensively examined by longitudinal and interventional approaches, studies on the association between psychosis and dream quality are scarce, and mainly cross-sectional. We conducted a three-week long prospective study in a group of healthy adults (N = 55), assessed schizotypal traits, daily PLEs, and the emotional quality of dreams recalled in the morning (N = 490). We extracted the latent factors of schizotypal traits and dream emotions, and examined the predictive value of trait-and state-like variables on day-to-day reports of PLEs and dream quality. PLEs reported in the evening predicted emotionally more negative and salient dream reports the following morning. On the other hand, the quality of dreams were not predictive of PLEs reported later during the day. Schizotypal personality traits were differentially associated with dream quality: Introvertive Anhedonia, Cognitive Disorganization, and General-Disorganized schizotypy were linked to more negative dream valence, whereas Unusual Experiences were associated with more salient dreams. Our findings highlight the relevance of the multidimensional nature of schizotypal traits, the role of different facets of schizotypy in daytime and nocturnal mental experiences, and the day-to-day associations between PLEs and dream affect. GENERAL SCIENTIFIC SUMMARIES (GSS): The aim of the study was to examine the temporal associations between psychotic-like experiences and dream emotions, taking into account the trait factors of schizotypy. Psychotic-like experiences during the evening hours predicted reporting more negative and salient dreams the following morning, and schizotypal personality traits were differentially associated with the dimensions of dream emotions.

The Role of Uncertainty in Models of Epistemic Curiosity

<p>The psychological research strategies of studying epistemic curiosity traditionally consider four factors of motivation to search for new information: the degree of familiarity with the subject, the expected value of information, the cultural framework of tolerance to new information and the features of the material resources of the epistemic situation. A comparison of these models shows that regardless of where the study of curiosity begins &mdash; in behavior, in mental processes, in personal characteristics or in interaction with the environment &mdash; the place of uncertainty in the conceptual system remains the same. Uncertainty is one of the key characteristics of modern culture, which raises the question of the degree of influence of its experiences on cognitive processes. The purpose of the article is to review foreign studies on the connection of epistemic curiosity with the experience of uncertainty. The article contains the analysis of the four main models of epistemic curiosity and the suggestion of the new (unifying) model, according to which curiosity is a tool for "managing uncertainty" in order to adapt in the most effective way to a complex, unpredictable environment.</p>

Children are more exploratory and learn more than adults in an approach-avoid task

Intuitively, children appear to be more exploratory than adults, and this exploration seems to help children learn,. However, there have been few clear tests of these ideas. We test whether exploration and learning change across development using a task that presents a "learning trap." In this task, exploitation-maximizing immediate reward and avoiding costs-may lead the learner to draw incorrect conclusions, while exploration may lead to better learning but be more costly. In Studies 1, 2, and 3 we find that preschoolers and early school-aged children explore more than adults and learn the true structure of the environment better. Study 3 demonstrates that children explore more than adults even though they, like adults, predict that exploration will be costly, and it shows that exploration and learning are correlated. Study 4 shows that children's and adults' learning depends on the evidence they generate during exploration: children exposed to adult-like evidence learn like adults, and adults exposed to child-like evidence learn like children. Together, these studies support the idea that children may be more exploratory than adults, and this increased exploration influences learning.

Magic Curiosity Arousing Tricks (MagicCATs): A novel stimulus collection to induce epistemic emotions

There has been considerable interest in empirical research on epistemic emotions, i.e., emotions related to knowledge-generating qualities of cognitive tasks and activities such as curiosity, interest, and surprise. One big challenge when studying epistemic emotions is systematically inducting these emotions in restricted experimental settings. The current study created a novel stimulus set called Magic Curiosity Arousing Tricks (MagicCATs): a collection of 166 short magic trick video clips that aim to induce a variety of epistemic emotions. MagicCATs are freely available for research and can be used in a variety of ways to examine epistemic emotions. Rating data also support that the magic tricks elicit a variety of epistemic emotions with sufficient inter-stimulus variability, demonstrating good psychometric properties for their use in psychological experiments.

Pedagogic prestidigitation: using magic tricks to enhance educational videos

Previous research suggests that magic tricks can be employed within an educational context to enhance attention, engagement, critical thinking and recall. This study builds on this work by examining the impact of incorporating magic tricks into an online educational video. Adult participants (N = 198) completed a need for cognition scale and then watched a video containing either several bespoke card tricks that had been specially devised to help tell the story of the Apollo Moon landings (Magic Video), or an almost identical video that did not contain any magic tricks (Control Video). All participants rated their levels of engagement, absorption and recall. Compared to the Control Video, the Magic Video was rated as significantly more interesting, informative and absorbing. There was no difference between the groups for recall. There was a positive correlation between participants’ need for cognition scores, and the degree to which they found the Magic Video interesting, and were willing to share it with others. The theoretical, methodological and practical implications of these results are discussed, along with recommendations for future work.