Schedule of Events | Symposia

Relationships between Curiosity and Eye Movement Indicators of Information Seeking in Adolescents

Poster Session D - Monday, March 31, 2025, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Cassandra Ivie¹ (ci2383a@american.edu), Sarah Wene¹, Elshadai Melkam¹, Sophia Stull¹, Emily Peterson¹; ¹American University, Washington, D.C.

Curiosity has been shown to enhance learning and memory, playing a key role in cognitive engagement and motivation. By acting as a motivator to seek information to fill a knowledge gap, curiosity increases information seeking behavior and later recall. However, few studies have explored this pattern in adolescents, particularly in authentic learning tasks. Moreover, this connection has not been thoroughly studied using eye-tracking. The current study aims to bridge this gap and investigate curiosity in the context of science learning using maps. Participants (N=21) enrolled in a high school GIS course were presented with descriptive information about three maps depicting climate science related phenomena and rated their curiosity to see each map. Their eye movements were tracked as they described things they noticed and wondered about each map. Trait curiosity was also measured prior to the experiment. In preliminary analysis, state curiosity predicted median saccade amplitude, a measure of diversity of information seeking. However, other eye movement measures of information seeking behavior showed trends in their association with state curiosity but did not reach significance. Trait curiosity was not related to any measure of information seeking. These findings provide a foundation for the further exploration of trait and state curiosity in adolescents, evaluation of the specific eye movement indicators associated with curiosity-driven information seeking, and the role task and stimuli play in that relationship. The use of a classroom applicable task and adolescent population also increases the generalizability of results to classroom applications.

Topic Area: EMOTION & SOCIAL: Emotion-cognition interactions