Curiosity as a metacognitive feeling

A transdisciplinary view on curiosity beyond linguistic humans: animals, infants, and artificial intelligence

“…In this view, non‐human animals and infants engage in explorative behaviours without using or having the concept of knowledge (Carruthers, 2018). However, recently an intriguing contra‐proposal was made by Goupil & Proust (2023), who argue that curiosity is a special type of ‘metacognitive feeling’ and represents an affective state resulting from an agent monitoring the success or failure of its own cognitive actions, which in the case of curiosity would be identifying and recognizing potential new information and acting thereupon. In fact, Goupil & Proust (2023) suggest that developing babies and animals engaging in curious information‐seeking represents rudimentary evidence for metacognitive competence.…”

“…Evaluating uncertainty relies on metacognitive abilities, through a constant assessment and awareness of what is known and what is not known (Goupil & Proust, 2023). Metacognitive skills, however, have long been thought to rely on complex reasoning and the ability to report one's own mental states.…”

“…In both psychological and computational models of intrinsic motivation, the same relevant distinction has been made between ‘knowledge‐based’ and ‘competence‐based’ intrinsic motivation (Mirolli & Baldassarre, 2013). Knowledge‐based intrinsic motivation is intended for accumulating knowledge based on the capacity of the system to model itself and its environment to predict the consequences of its actions; in other words what Goupil & Proust (2023) describe as foundations for metacognition. On the contrary, competence‐based intrinsic motivation is for acquiring skills based on what the system can do by means of using predictions to obtain a measure of its competence to produce effective interactions with the environment.…”

Individual differences in processing speed and curiosity explain infant habituation and dishabituation performance

“…A stronger bias towards informative stimuli results in higher $$\beta _{LT}^1$$ values. Hence, we used $$\beta _{LT}^1$$ as a proxy for curiosity, defined as a bias towards information‐rich stimuli (Dubey & Griffiths, 2020; Goupil & Proust, 2023). It is important to stress that curiosity is a multidimensional construct that encompasses motivational and cognitive components (Goupil & Proust, 2023), and is driven by a multitude of factors, such as surprise (Iigaya et al., 2016), information gain (Bennett et al., 2016) and learning progress (Poli et al., 2022).…”

“…Hence, we used $$\beta _{LT}^1$$ as a proxy for curiosity, defined as a bias towards information‐rich stimuli (Dubey & Griffiths, 2020; Goupil & Proust, 2023). It is important to stress that curiosity is a multidimensional construct that encompasses motivational and cognitive components (Goupil & Proust, 2023), and is driven by a multitude of factors, such as surprise (Iigaya et al., 2016), information gain (Bennett et al., 2016) and learning progress (Poli et al., 2022). The current paradigm taps into one key aspect of curiosity that received much attention in recent theoretical and experimental research (Poli et al., 2020; Twomey & Westermann, 2018), namely the degree to which infants are sensitive to information.…”