Curiosity overpowers cognitive effort avoidance tendencies

Abstract

Curiosity has been described as a desire to learn new information, and previous studies have demonstrated that curiosity drives peoples’ decision to invest resources (e.g., time or tokens) to find out answers. It is commonly assumed that curiosity should also prompt people to invest more effort until they attain unknown answers. However, experimental evidence is lacking on whether people would be willing to exert cognitive effort — in addition to time investments — to find out answers. In three pre-registered experiments, we first asked participants to rate a set of 20 trivia questions regarding their curiosity about knowing the answers. Subsequently, participants had to perform a set of random-dot kinematograms (RDKs) to view the answer to each trivia question. We varied the motion coherence of the RDKs as a proxy for cognitive effort demands and tested whether curiosity overpowers cognitive effort avoidance tendencies. Our results provide converging evidence that curiosity outweighs peoples’ tendencies to avoid cognitive effort. That is, participants avoided high-effort RDKs if they were not curious about information and when the exertion of cognitive effort did not affect the attainment of information. However, if participants were curious about questions and if no alternative low-effort option was available, they were willing to employ cognitive effort to find out answers.