Yes/no feedback that participants were correct nearly quenched curiosity for correct answers, whereas without feedback curiosity peaked at moderate-to-high confidence¶

Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study · causal r2 · q3
Currency · newest study 2023 · not yet checked against its sources · not reviewed by a person

Subclaims¶

q3 i? When participants were told they were correct, curiosity fell to close to zero, while in the no-feedback condition curiosity peaked at moderate certainty and declined as certainty increased. → Metcalfe 2023

Evidence¶

Metcalfe 2023¶

Metcalfe, J., Vuorre, M., Towner, E., & Eich, T. S. (2023). Curiosity: The effects of feedback and confidence on the desire to know. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, vol. 152, no. 2, pp. 464-482. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0001284

q3 · i? · causal · r2

Experiment 2, a within-subjects study of 80 Columbia/Barnard students with yes/no feedback on a random half of trials and no feedback on the other half, modeled curiosity with multilevel regression. In the feedback condition "curiosity fell to close to zero" (bIntercept = 8.97), versus an intercept of 52.98 without feedback, where curiosity peaked at moderate certainty.

"Once they were told that they were correct, however, curiosity fell to close to zero, just as was expected ( bIntercept = 8.97, SE = 2.50,"

Discussion¶

Learner Variables¶

• Interest — outcome: instruction changes it

Related Claims¶

• Curiosity ratings are functionally distinct from subjective uncertainty ratings: uncertainty declines near-linearly with confidence while curiosity is inverted-U shaped — related
• Without feedback, people are more curious about high-confidence errors than about equally high-confidence correct answers, replicated across experiments — related
• Yes/no feedback that one was wrong increased curiosity selectively for high-confidence errors, leaving curiosity about low-confidence errors largely unchanged — related
• Second-order metacognitive judgments of subjective uncertainty show a small high-confidence error/correct difference, smaller than curiosity ratings show — related
• Low and medium Knowledge Confidence heighten curiosity, contradicting the predicted inverted U-shaped relationship
• Curiosity and confidence show an inverted U-shaped relationship, peaking at an intermediate confidence level — related
• Curiosity about trivia answers is a U-shaped function of confidence, supporting information-gap theory — related
• Correctness Confidence linearly predicts curiosity, with higher confidence in a guess associated with greater curiosity — related
• Specific and diversive curiosity are labels on a continuum of information generality within one knowledge-gap-driven process, not categorically distinct types — related
• Higher confidence reduced knowledge exploration after correct answers, and high-confidence errors showed no effect on exploration — related