Ask any birder, and they’ll tell you about the thrill of identifying a new species. Recently a tapping sound outside a window alerted one of us (Hsiung) to the presence of a striking, unfamiliar woodpecker in a nearby tree. Woodpeckers are fairly common in Hsiung’s neighborhood in the southeastern U.S., but this one looked different. Its head was plumed with large red feathers, and it was huge—the size of a crow. Curious, she whipped out a phone app and soon became acquainted with the Pileated Woodpecker.
Scientists have often seen curiosity as motivation to discover new information and to initiate and facilitate learning. That framing suggests that curiosity is all about acting now—that it drives us to find answers as soon as possible. In previous research, when people were able to choose whether to receive their highly anticipated answer to a question now or later, they generally opted for the fastest path to resolution.
This impatience for answers aligns with what psychologists think is a main function of curiosity: to reduce uncertainty. The state of not knowing or of recognizing a gap in your knowledge can be discomfiting, like an itch that needs to be scratched. This feeling of uncertainty then motivates a search for information that, when obtained, is met with relief and satisfaction.
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But this picture of curiosity is incomplete. Consider how people watch a murder-mystery movie. As the tension builds, viewers want to know the identity and the motive of the murderer—but unlike the desire to identify a strange new bird, most don’t feel the urge to reach for a phone and resolve that curiosity. Instead people savor the twists and turns of the plot as they gather more information. The desire to avoid premature resolution is so common that viewers explicitly label details in online conversations with “spoiler alerts” to help one another preserve uncertainty.
In a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, we explored whether there are multiple flavors of curiosity. We found that although piquing interest can indeed drive an urgent desire for answers, it can also elicit more patience, setting people up for those moments of discovery.
We asked more than 2,000 people aged 19 to 76 years to watch a series of short videos that we created for an online experiment. Each video started with a blank screen. A line would then appear and squiggle around, gradually taking a shape. Imagine, for example, an animated line that begins to wiggle upward and downward, tracing a series of triangles reminiscent of a crown or mountain range. The line then extends, forming an oval around the triangles, resembling an Easter egg. Then, just as you start to feel certain you know what the finished drawing will be, long, pointy spikes are sketched at the top, revealing the true subject: a pineapple.
As curiosity evolves over different lines of questioning, the emotional tone may shift from playful happiness to urgent discomfort.
While our study participants watched each video, we asked them to report how curious they were about what the drawing would become and to guess what the drawing was going to turn into. They also told us, on a scale of 1 to 100 from least to most, how confident they felt about their prediction and how much joy or frustration they felt. Those replies let us gauge how curiosity changed as people saw more of a video. We also gave them the choice to either keep watching the drawing slowly unfold or jump to the end of the video, revealing the entire picture immediately.
Interestingly, when participants were more curious about what the drawing would become, they were more likely to continue watching rather than skipping ahead to the answer. In other words, greater inquisitiveness motivated people to slow down, be patient and invest in experiencing the winding path to resolution. Although past work has shown that more intense curiosity increases people’s motivation to get information, our study found that it also contributes to greater avoidance of “early” answers.
Why do our findings differ from those of other studies? One important factor is what happens while people wait for more details. Watching events unfold over time, as in our animations, may be less uncomfortable than simply wanting a missing answer—imagine if Hsiung had just stared at the woodpecker while gaining no new information about it. Further, curiosity may feel different when people assume that answers are on the way. When opportunities to seek information abound, curiosity may favor its patient accumulation. But when it seems like waiting will yield limited information, people might prefer immediate resolution.
Our experiment also revealed that curiosity was highest at two key points: first, when uncertainty was the greatest, and second, when people were very close to identifying the drawings. To us, this signaled that curiosity seemed to evolve along with the question a person was asking, such as with a shift from an exploratory musing (“What could this drawing be?”) to a more focused query (“Is this going to be an Easter egg?”).
The desire for information also seemed to feel different across the journey to resolution. When uncertainty was greatest, curiosity was experienced with joy. But during the second peak, as people got closer to the big reveal, curiosity coincided with frustration, perhaps like the sensation when a word is right on the tip of your tongue. As curiosity evolves over different lines of questioning, the emotional tone may shift from playful happiness to urgent discomfort.
So as people watched the video, curiosity would grow, change in emotional timbre and then decline with resolution. Yet regardless of how curiosity changed, we found that greater curiosity encouraged engagement in the process and led to a greater desire to let a video play out rather than skipping to the answer.
Our work underlines the complexity of curiosity, opening new avenues for research to explore its varieties. Thinking about curiosity as going beyond the need for quick answers also highlights the power of what happens when we engage with uncertainty: having to ponder and anticipate answers can improve learning and memory, and curiosity can facilitate brain states that help us encode new information. Learning new things can be tough, but harnessing curiosity can help us savor the process of learning and delight in overcoming challenges as much as we like working out a whodunit—all in due time.
Are you a scientist who specializes in neuroscience, cognitive science or psychology? And have you read a recent peer-reviewed paper that you would like to write about for Mind Matters? Please send suggestions to Scientific American’s Mind Matters editor Daisy Yuhas at dyuhas@sciam.com.
This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.