Epistemic curiosity is a widely studied concept across education, emotion, motivation, and cognitive sciences and has various modern theoretical approaches, including but not limited to the epistemic emotion approach. With our theoretical work in Chapter 1, we reviewed classic and modern views of curiosity : we discuss drive, optimal arousal, intrinsic motivation, information gap, emotion, reward and computational accounts. We propose an integrative appraisal model of curiosity, unifying information gap, emotion, and reward accounts of curiosity through the lens of appraisal theories of emotion, and more specifically of the component process model.
Part of the integrative appraisal model of curiosity we propose relies on the information-as-reward hypothesis which suggests that curiosity, when elicited, confers a reward value to its object and functions like a reward anticipation process, involving the same brain regions as classic rewards (e.g. monetary or food rewards). In other words, according to this hypothesis, curiosity-eliciting information is rewarding. In Chapter 2, we reviewed fMRI neuroimaging, EEG neuroimaging, physiological, and behavioral evidence in favor of the reward anticipation account of curiosity and discuss how prior findings show that epistemic curiosity activates the reward circuit including dopaminergic systems, creates an appetitive approach behavior to its object (i.e. wanting), liking, and learning.
The integral appraisal model of curiosity posits that epistemic curiosity is predicted by a specific appraisal structure. This is based on the component process model and component process model inspired studies of curiosity and interest. In Chapter 3, we investigated the causal relationship between appraisals and epistemic emotions (i.e., surprise, curiosity, excitement, confusion, anxiety, frustration and boredom) during an academic reading task. We applied multivariate Bayesian mixed effects regression models to estimate within-, between- person and text variance separately, as well as to account for potential correlations between epistemic emotions. Our results, and their replication, display the causal effect of the appraisals of novelty, complexity, comprehension/coping and concern relevance on epistemic emotions. Epistemic emotions such as surprise, excitement and boredom shared variance with curiosity that remained unexplained by our predictors, hinting at undiscovered factors.
Finally, we investigated the brain basis of epistemic emotions and of the appraisal processes. To do this, in Chapter 4, we analyzed the BOLD fMRI imaging data from 97 participants who had passively viewed 95 short videos in the scanner with the self-reports, from an independent sample, of 20 appraisals and 13 emotions on the same dataset. Our results display the large, distributed nature of both appraisal processes and the conscious experience of epistemic emotions. Findings suggest high similarity between cognitive and subjective components of emotion.
