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Description
Curiosity has long been assumed to promote exploration, and in turn, to support cognitive map formation. However, little research has directly investigated these claims. Recently, Cen et al. (2024) demonstrated that when participants feel more curious about specific virtual environments, they (1) explore those environments more thoroughly, and (2) display better memory for environmental layouts. These data support the existence of a relationship between curiosity and cognitive map formation; however, because participants always had the opportunity to act on their curiosity (by using it to guide their exploration), the precise nature of that relationship remains uncertain.
Here, we ask whether curiosity directly promotes cognitive map formation, or whether its benefits depend on the ability to actively engage in curiosity-guided exploration. Through a yoked design, two groups of participants engaged in either active or passive exploration through a set of novel virtual environments. This manipulation allows us to disentangle the influences of self-reported curiosity (varying trial-by-trial across all participants) and active exploration (manipulated between groups) on cognitive map formation.
