Schedule of Events | Symposia

Wikipedia Exploration Over Time: Conceptualizing Age-Related Changes in Curiosity

Poster Session B - Sunday, March 30, 2025, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Michelle E. Hirsch¹ (michellehirsch8@gmail.com), Andrée-Ann Cyr², Buddhika Bellana^2,3; ¹York University, ²York University, Glendon Campus, ³Rotman Research Institute, Baycrest Health Sciences

Curiosity, the intrinsic drive to seek information, is critical to well-being in old age. While past research shows age-related declines in self-reported curiosity, objective measures suggest older adults indeed express curiosity; however, the information-seeking styles underlying its expression may differ. Decision-making and memory literature findings show that older adults tend to display a more exploitative style (reliance on prior knowledge), whereas younger adults display a more exploratory style (preference for novelty). While considerable work exists on curiosity, few paradigms have examined curiosity alongside its consequences on real-world information-seeking. To address this gap, we propose an information-foraging task where participants freely browse Wikipedia (Lydon-Staley et al., 2021). Exploitative and explorative information-seeking patterns can be operationalized through the semantic relatedness between visited pages (i.e., higher semantic relatedness in exploitative information-seeking). To assess the utility of this approach, we simulated data (i.e., Wikipedia URLs) for either information-seeking pattern (exploitative: n = 72; explorative: n = 72) using ChatGPT. Extracted texts per URL were then transformed into a numerical vector (via tf-idf), and semantic similarity between URLs was estimated using cosine similarity, alongside graph theoretic and trajectory-based metrics. Analysis of effect sizes (Cohen’s d) indicated that all metrics had very large effects (> 0.8) and aligned with exploitative and explorative groups in the predicted directions, suggesting feasibility. As such, our work may be an effective paradigm for enhancing our understanding of the relationship between curiosity and aging in the context of real-world information-seeking – with potential downstream implications for curiosity-based interventions in old age.

Topic Area: THINKING: Development & aging