The effect of information gap and uncertainty on curiosity and its resolution

ABSTRACT

We used a novel missing-letters task to induce curiosity, where participants were shown as a stimulus a nine letter word with some letters missing (2, 4, or 7 missing letters) and asked to complete the word. We found that both information gap (number of letters missing) and participants’ uncertainty regarding the complete word predicted their curiosity to learn the complete word. Participants were later shown the complete word, and their learning satisfaction (measured directly through self-ratings, and indirectly through the affect misattribution procedure) was found to be influenced by the information gap, their familiarity with the word, and whether they had been able to correctly guess the complete word. We proposed a schema verification view of curiosity—people resolve information gaps because they are motivated to verify their prior schema of the environment—to explain our findings and to integrate it with prior work on the topic.

KEYWORDS:

• curiosity
• information gap
• motivation
• affect
• uncertainty

Disclosure statement

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

Ethical approval

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional committee, and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

This article does not contain any studies with animals performed by any of the authors.

Informed consent

Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available at: Singh, Aditya (2019), “Information-gap, uncertainty, and curiosity”, Mendeley Data, V2, doi:10.17632/zntvw9287y.2 https://doi.org/10.17632/zntvw9287y.2.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a grant by the Indian Council of Social Science Research (IMPRESS/P703/242/2018-19/ICSSR). The funders had no role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.