Our tendency to be curious about our environment and our capacity to effectively explore it are central to human intelligence. This dissertation takes a functional approach to investigating curiosity and exploration, examining the systematic, and at times approximate, manner humans seek information in service of their varied goals. In chapter one, I examine exploratory behavior in the service of a prescribed goal using a paradigm that allows for tight experimental control. Comparing participants’ choices to the optimal strategy for this task, I show that humans explore as if balancing seeking goal-relevant information with managing their limited cognitive resources.
Chapters two and three focus on epistemic information-seeking driven by curiosity in more naturalistic contexts. In chapter two I chart the relationship between information seeking and motivation, asking how an acute change to motivation impacts information seeking. By measuring the profound changes to motivation affected by the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, as well as information seeking behavior and expectations of usefulness, I show that motivation both directs information seeking to goal-relevant information, as well as energizing the seeking of information of any kind.
In chapter three, I examine how fine-scale changes to motivation, brought about by previous learning experiences, influence curiosity in a continual manner. I find that learning satisfying information both enhances curiosity for similar information and decreases curiosity for dissimilar information. Combined, these three chapters demonstrate the sophistication of human information-seeking strategies, which are efficient, flexible, and adapted to the constraints of human cognition.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:columbia.edu/oai:academiccommons.columbia.edu:10.7916/htbf-se13 |
| Date | January 2024 |
| Creators | Abir, Yaniv |
| Source Sets | Columbia University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Theses |
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