Smokers’ Curiosity Facilitates Recall of Tobacco-Related Health Information

ABSTRACT

Curiosity promotes learning. Two open questions concern the extent to which tobacco smokers exhibit curiosity about smoking-related health information and whether this curiosity can facilitate recall of this information. Participants (n = 324 smokers; n = 280 nonsmokers) performed a Trivia Guessing Task wherein participants guessed the answers to general trivia and smoking-related trivia questions and provided ratings of their curiosity prior to viewing the answers to the questions. A subset of participants (n = 121 smokers; n = 97 nonsmokers) completed a surprise Trivia Memory Task one-week later and answered the previously-viewed questions. Results indicate that smokers are no less curious about smoking-related trivia than they are about general trivia and that curiosity about the answer to smoking-related trivia is associated with more accurate recall of smoking-related trivia answers one week later. Findings suggest that engendering states of curiosity for smoking-related information may facilitate retention of that information in smokers.

Acknowledgments

The authors acknowledge support from that National Institute of Drug Abuse (K01 DA047417) and the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of any of the funding agencies.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Citation diversity statement

Recent work has identified a bias in citation practices in the field of communication such that papers from women and other minority scholars are under-cited relative to the number of such papers in the field (Wang et al., 2021). Here we sought to proactively consider choosing references that reflect the diversity of the field in thought, form of contribution, gender, and other factors. First, we obtained the predicted gender of the first and last author of each reference by using databases that store the probability of a first name being carried by a woman (Zhou et al., 2020). By this measure (and excluding self-citations to the first and last authors of our current paper), our references contain 16.33% woman(first)/woman(last), 12.26% man/woman, 17.05% woman/man, and 54.36% man/man. This method is limited in that a) names, pronouns, and social media profiles used to construct the databases may not, in every case, be indicative of gender identity and b) it cannot account for intersex, non-binary, or transgender people. We look forward to future work that could help us to better understand how to support equitable practices in science.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/10410236.2022.2149098.

Data availability statement

Data used in the manuscript are available on the Open Science Foundation: https://osf.io/cx7uq/?view_only=ef59fb0fe07042d8a7b788403084dd75

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse