Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: Cognitive maps are thought to arise, at least in part, from our intrinsic curiosity to explore unknown places. However, it remains untested how curiosity shapes aspects of spatial exploration in humans. Combining a virtual reality task with indices of exploration complexity, we found that pre-exploration curiosity states predicted how much individuals spatially explored environments, whereas markers of visual exploration determined post-exploration feelings of interest. Moreover, individual differences in curiosity traits, particularly Stress Tolerance, modulated the relationship between curiosity and spatial exploration, suggesting the capacity to cope with uncertainty enhances the curiosity-exploration link. Furthermore, both curiosity and spatial exploration predicted how precisely participants could recall spatial-relational details of the environment, as measured by a sketch map task. These results provide new evidence for a link between curiosity and exploratory behaviour, and how curiosity might shape cognitive map formation.
Source: Communications Psychology
Language: English
Subfield: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $2,090
Awards: The subiculum: a key interface between scene representation and event memory?, G1547993707, G1693496780, G2092553436, Let's have a walk in a virtual world: using Virtual Reality technologies to study the visual guidance of walking, How curiosity enhances hippocampus-dependent memory, G4085710227
OpenAlex ID: W4405892605