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Description
Curiosity motivates to investigate, gain knowledge, and adjust to uncertain situations. Curiosity-driven learning has been associated with enhanced memory and comprehension, establishing it a vital aspect of cognitive growth. Agency, the feeling of having control over one’s learning process, might amplify curiosity advantages by enabling learners to guide their own exploration. Metacognitive monitoring also plays a role in curiosity by supporting the evaluation of uncertainty and learning progress. To date, little is known about the ways in which these abilities interact to support curiosity and curiosity-based learning across childhood and adolescence. The present study combines behavioural, experiential, and physiological measures in a longitudinal design to investigate how curiosity, metacognition, and agency support memory development in children between 10 and 14 years (planned N = 200). Participants will be assessed at two time points approximately one year apart. Experimental paradigms will assess self-reported curiosity levels, exploratory behaviour, and information prediction errors (IPEs). These experimental paradigms will vary on the degree to which participants can actively choose what to explore or learn next. We will combine retrospective confidence judgments, with questionnaires and “think-aloud” protocols to assess metacognitive development. Daily sampling for one-week will assess short-term changes in curiosity, affect and self-efficacy at three timepoints across the year. We expect that children will improve in curiosity-based learning with increasing IPE-effects over time, and that metacognition and agency will positively influence curiosity-based learning. Together this study aims to clarify how curiosity-based learning develops in childhood across time and methods.
