Curiosity drives individuals to seek new information and engage in exploratory behaviors, playing a key role in expanding knowledge and inspiring discovery. Understanding curiosity and its underlying mechanisms is essential given its importance in motivating information-seeking and driving knowledge acquisition. Research on curiosity has primarily focused on its role in human adaptation, linking it to positive outcomes such as academic success and well-being in school-age children and adults. However, scholars often overlook the origins of this trait. If curiosity drove Albert Einstein to develop his groundbreaking theories, what factors made Einstein so curious in the first place? The exploration of individual differences in curiosity and the factors that influence them remains mostly unexamined. To truly understand the roots of curiosity, it is essential to investigate it during its early stages, in the critical years when foundational cognitive and social skills are formed.
Infants naturally express curiosity by seeking contact with, approaching, and exploring the objects and people around them as they learn to understand the world. Despite this, our understanding of early-stage curiosity and its underpinning mechanisms is limited. Most research on curiosity in adults relies on self-report measures and tasks unsuitable for infants and young children. As a result, although curiosity is linked to specific brain regions’ activity and physiological responses in adults, the neurophysiological mechanisms underlying curiosity in infants remain poorly understood. Moreover, the existing literature lacks a thorough examination of why individual differences in curiosity emerge—why do some infants engage more eagerly with their environment than others?
Since children’s curiosity develops within a social context, those around them, particularly parents, play a significant role. Parenting, as a major influence on child development, has been suggested in recent studies to enhance curiosity through behaviors such as responsiveness and encouragement. However, there is still a lack of detailed investigation into how specific parental behaviors contribute to the development of curiosity during infancy.
A Groundbreaking Approach
This project aims to address these gaps by providing new insights into the early development of curiosity, its neurophysiological correlates, and how curiosity is influenced by parenting. We will do so through a novel, multi-informant, and multi-method approach, combining observation with experimental tasks developed to accurately capture early curiosity and its neurophysiological and behavioral correlates.
The project consists of two studies. Study 1 is a secondary analysis and follow-up data collection of a previous project (Grant 131/2020) involving data from 50 mother-infant dyads, aiming to examine the relationship among parental behaviors, infant neural activity, and curiosity in toddlerhood. Study 2 involves 100 mother-infant dyads, assessing curiosity through behavioral observations of mother-infant-toy interactions and a computer task designed to measure curiosity-driven neurophysiological reactions. EEG and eye-tracking data will be used to explore the neural and physiological correlates of curiosity.
Major Innovative Aspects of the Project
Focus on Early Development: The project targets infants aged 6-9 months, a critical period for identifying the emergence of curiosity, also offering a longitudinal perspective by following up on previous data at 3 years of age.
Integration of Neurophysiological Data: The project uses advanced techniques, such as EEG (with analyses of neural connectivity and theta activity) and eye-tracking (with analyses of pupil dilation and eye movements), to link specific neural and gaze patterns with curiosity in infancy.
Examination of Parental Influence: The project systematically examines how parenting shapes curio