Abstract/Summary

Curiosity and interest have long been a topic of psychology and education and there is no consensus about their conceptualizations, mechanisms and measurements. A contemporary work on curiosity treats information-seeking as reward learning; likewise, recent work on interest has also emphasized the importance of rewarding feeling. This led researchers to consider curiosity and interest in the common scheme called a reward learning framework of knowledge acquisition. The purpose of the current dissertation is to examine the similarity and differences of curiosity and interest based on this framework, using both qualitative and quantitative methods. The first study (Chapter 2) examined people’s naïve beliefs about curiosity and interest. The results showed that while curiosity was considered to be active feelings towards uncertainty, interest was considered to be a more stable feeling than curiosity, which was more oriented towards certain things. On the other hand, curiosity and interest had a substantial overlap on knowledge acquisition process. The second study (Chapter 3) developed a new Curiosity and Interest as Rewarding Feeling scale (CIRF). The final 9-item scale showed a good fit with a single factor model, indicating that it may not be necessary to distinguish curiosity and interest when assessing the rewarding feeling caused by knowledge acquisition. In the last studies (Study 3a and Study 3b; Chapter 4), we tested the construct validity of CIRF by examining the relationship of the newly developed scale with other relevant scales. Overall, the developed scale demonstrated the pattern of relationships consistent with the predictions. These studies underscored the complex relationship of curiosity and interest during the knowledge acquisition process in the reward learning framework. Critical evaluations have been included in the last chapter, which drew a broader conclusion in the interaction between curiosity and interest during knowledge acquisition process and also discussed some implications.