Why We Need to Know: The Psychology and Neuroscience of Curiosity

The irresistible pull of an unanswered question

A friend is telling you about the old cinema on the corner. During renovations, someone found a small brass key behind the screen. ‘And do you know what it opened?’ The train doors slide apart before your friend can finish, and you both have to move. Five minutes later, you are still thinking about the key. The answer would make little difference to your day, yet you would happily spend a few more minutes finding it out.

That small interruption reveals something important about motivation. Information can be worth pursuing for its own sake. A story, a puzzle or an unexpected observation can turn a fact you never cared about into one you actively want to learn. Psychologists study that change through the questions people ask, the time they will spend and what they remember afterwards. Each measure captures a different part of the experience (Kidd & Hayden, 2015).

What is curiosity?

Epistemic curiosity is the desire to acquire knowledge. You might want to identify an unfamiliar bird, understand how a magician performed a trick or discover why a building has an entrance that leads nowhere. Perceptual curiosity begins with something you sense, such as an odd sound in the kitchen. Turning towards it lets you inspect the source. If you then wonder why the refrigerator makes that noise only at night, a sensory puzzle has become a question about causes (Kidd & Hayden, 2015).

Novelty seeking overlaps with curiosity. Picking up an unfamiliar object may lead to discovery, while choosing a new route home may appeal simply because it offers a change of scene. Researchers also distinguish state curiosity, the feeling elicited by a particular question at a particular moment, from trait curiosity, a relatively stable tendency to seek information or engage with novelty across situations. Someone who rarely reads about machinery can spend an evening trying to understand a mechanical clock. Their curiosity about that clock tells us something about the encounter and only a little about how they approach the rest of life (Whatley et al., 2025).

The information-gap theory

George Loewenstein (1994) proposed that curiosity arises when we become aware of a gap between what we know and what we want to know. The cinema story supplies enough detail for you to represent the missing piece. Before hearing about the key, there was no question about what it opened. Once you have pictured it behind the screen, the absence of an answer can feel mildly uncomfortable. Finding the answer relieves that feeling.

The theory explains why a little knowledge can generate a strong desire for more. A hint in a crossword gives you a place to start. If you already know the answer, the immediate puzzle is resolved. If the clue is incomprehensible, there may be too little to go on. In one trivia experiment, curiosity tended to peak when participants were moderately confident in their guesses (Kang et al., 2009). But moderate confidence is one way of measuring a perceived gap. With blurred pictures, people who reported having no idea and those who felt unsure expressed similarly high curiosity relative to people who thought they knew the answer. The task and the way confidence is asked about matter (Chen et al., 2025).

Why uncertainty attracts us

Uncertainty feels different when you can identify what would resolve it. A novice listening to two astronomers debate a faint signal may have little idea what is at stake. Once they learn the signal could come from either a distant object or a fault in the instrument, the same conversation gives them a question they can follow. Wade and Kidd (2019) found that estimates of what participants knew predicted trivia curiosity better than a measure of actual knowledge. Existing knowledge helps structure a question, while the sense that an answer is within reach can give it urgency.

Uncertainty can motivate exploration even when an answer has little practical use. In a lottery task, people were more curious about more uncertain outcomes and were more willing to wait to see them, although seeing the outcome could not change the payoff (van Lieshout et al., 2018). In everyday life, relevance also matters. Across three studies involving 867 participants, people expressed greater curiosity about explanations they expected would help them learn or be useful later (Liquin & Lombrozo, 2020). An unresolved question about your own garden can matter more than a harder one about a plant you have never seen. The value of knowing depends in part on what you could do with the answer or what else it might help you understand.

The neuroscience of wanting to know

Anticipating an answer

Kang et al. (2009) asked 19 students to read trivia questions in a functional MRI scanner, guess the answers and rate how curious and confident they felt. Higher curiosity was associated with activity in the caudate, a part of the striatum involved in learning and evaluating possible outcomes. In separate behavioural experiments, people were willing to spend tokens or time to see answers they wanted more. Among the 12 participants who returned for the delayed test 11–16 days later, recall was better for answers that had prompted more curiosity, particularly when the initial guesses were wrong.

Gruber et al. (2014) selected questions for each participant according to how curious they were about the answers. Anticipating a highly desired answer was associated with greater activity in the nucleus accumbens, part of the ventral striatum, and a midbrain region containing the substantia nigra and ventral tegmental area. In the imaging experiment’s recall comparison, 18 participants remembered about 71% of answers to high-curiosity questions and 54% of answers to low-curiosity questions. The researchers also found that patterns of hippocampal and midbrain activity and their functional coupling were associated with individual differences in memory for faces seen while waiting. The hippocampus helps bind elements of an experience into a memory.

What the imaging measures

Functional MRI tracks changes in blood oxygenation related to neural activity. The midbrain region contains dopamine-producing cells alongside other cell types. Its activity makes a dopamine-related explanation plausible, while demonstrating release would require a separate measurement. Functional coupling describes how signals vary together and leaves the direction of influence open. Monosov’s (2024) review of primate research describes partly distinct circuits for approaching novelty, anticipating informative outcomes and weighing information against other rewards. Even a simple act such as waiting for an answer can recruit several processes.

How curiosity influences learning

Remembering the answer you wanted

A compelling question gives attention a target. When the answer arrives, you can compare it with your guess and connect it to what you already know. The prediction, appraisal, curiosity and exploration framework proposes that noticing a discrepancy and judging it worth investigating can set up exploration and memory formation (Gruber & Ranganath, 2019). Those steps help explain why preparing to hear an answer might matter. Evidence from trivia tasks often compares questions people already find more or less compelling, so the contribution of curiosity is difficult to separate from familiarity, personal interest and the distinctiveness of the answer.

In Wade and Kidd’s (2019) study, measured prior knowledge and curiosity both predicted learning, with a modest additional association for curiosity. In Chen et al.’s (2025) blurred-picture study, which analysed 100 adults, curiosity ratings showed no reliable relationship with immediate recall of the object names after accounting for confidence. The two tasks make different demands. Recalling a label for an image is a different test from retrieving a fact you can connect to a web of existing knowledge.

What happens to nearby information?

Gruber et al. (2014) found that participants in a separate next-day test were more likely to recognise incidental faces with high confidence after high-curiosity trials. Overall recognition in that comparison showed no reliable advantage. In an online study with 239 adults across three versions of a task, Keller et al. (2024) found poorer memory for unrelated school facts presented around highly intriguing trivia questions. The difference between recognising a face and retaining a competing verbal fact matters. A gripping question may direct processing towards the answer and leave less attention for material that competes with it. For more on how details of an experience are retained and retrieved, see Why Memory Is Not a Recording.

Why discovering an answer feels rewarding

Waiting for an answer and receiving it are two different experiences. The moment before a magician reveals the method can be exciting. The explanation may then be disappointing, or it may fit the evidence in a way you had overlooked and leave you more satisfied than you expected. In a two-day trivia study with 66 people completing both sessions, Marvin and Shohamy (2016) found that people were more willing to wait when they were more curious about the answer and were also more willing to wait for positively rated topics than neutral ones. Answers that were more satisfying than participants’ initial curiosity ratings would predict were also more likely to be remembered the following day. The researchers used the difference between these ratings as a behavioural measure of an information prediction error. For a parallel example of how anticipation shapes an experience, see Why Music Gives Us Goosebumps.

There are several ways for information to have value. It can change a decision, resolve an irritating doubt or make a previously puzzling pattern intelligible. The prospect of an unpleasant answer can also make leaving a gap open attractive. Golman and Loewenstein (2018) proposed that the value of information depends partly on how much attention a question attracts and how we expect its resolution to feel. This helps explain why people can be willing to wait for a trivia answer and reluctant to open a message they expect will contain bad news.

Why some people are more curious than others

Personality helps explain who frequently seeks unfamiliar ideas and experiences. Openness to experience overlaps with this tendency, but curiosity also varies in form. A person can eagerly investigate a technical problem and feel little interest in what their neighbours are doing. In their work on curiosity scales, Kashdan et al. (2018) distinguished dimensions including the enjoyment of exploration, the urge to resolve a missing piece of knowledge and the willingness to tolerate the unease of unfamiliar situations.

Litman (2008) describes two related forms of epistemic curiosity. Interest-type curiosity is the pleasure of finding something new. A train enthusiast might browse old timetables for the enjoyment of seeing how a network changed. Deprivation-type curiosity is the urge to close a specific gap, such as discovering why a station disappeared from one edition. Both can occur on the same afternoon. These are dimensions measured by questionnaires, and what a person actually investigates still depends on their knowledge, goals and circumstances. For a broader discussion of how experiences and dispositions can differ even within one family, see Why Siblings Become So Different.

Curiosity throughout life

From exploring objects to asking better questions

A young child can explore an unexpected event by looking longer, trying an action again or asking someone what happened. Each behaviour offers a different clue about the child’s motivation. Repeating an action may be an attempt to see whether it produces the same result, while a question can narrow the possibilities directly. What counts as evidence of curiosity depends on the child’s age, the task and the opportunities available for exploration (Jirout et al., 2024).

Lapidow et al. (2026) tested 144 children aged five to seven. When trying to explain events, even the youngest used knowledge about plausible causes to select informative questions and generate questions of their own. Efficiency improved with age. In a study of 60 children and adolescents aged ten to fourteen, curiosity before seeing a trivia answer was associated with better memory in both age groups. How interesting the answer seemed afterwards had a stronger additional association with memory in the adolescents (Fandakova & Gruber, 2021).

Curiosity in adulthood

Whatley et al. (2025) studied 1,218 adults in a preregistered analysis. Older age was associated with lower scores on a questionnaire about general curiosity and higher curiosity ratings in a trivia task. The study compared people of different ages at one point in time, so cohort and life experience remain possible explanations. It also shows why a broad question about someone’s usual habits and a specific question that interests them can tell different stories about curiosity.

The darker side of curiosity

Sometimes the only reward on offer is finding out. Hsee and Ruan (2016) found that people clicked prank pens more often when it was unclear which would deliver an electric shock than when the pens were labelled by outcome. Oosterwijk (2017) found that participants sometimes chose to see negative social scenes over neutral alternatives. An image may be unpleasant to view and still contain information about what happened to someone and why. Choosing to look is a different judgement from enjoying what you see.

Regret is easy to imagine when a spoiler changes how a story will feel or an upsetting detail stays in mind. Searching also takes time. You can spend half an hour pursuing a minor point that seemed urgent when it appeared, only to find it has little bearing on the work you meant to do. A gap can feel compelling now while offering very little once it is closed. The cost of satisfying it depends on what the search displaces and what you discover along the way.

Curiosity in the digital world

A headline or social media clip can make a gap visible in seconds. ‘This is what the owners found behind the cinema screen’ identifies an event while withholding the discovery. Yet an entirely vague headline may give a reader too little reason to click. Aubin Le Quéré and Matias (2025) analysed 8,977 randomised headline tests from the publisher Upworthy. Adding concrete details tended to help when the alternatives were already vague and hurt when they were already highly concrete. These were click-through decisions among one publisher’s readers. They tell us about selection in that setting and leave open what people understood or remembered after clicking.

Search engines make it easy to move from a well-formed question to a succession of related ones. This can reveal sources you would otherwise miss. In a series of experiments, people who had looked up explanations online subsequently rated their ability to explain unrelated topics more highly than those who had answered without searching. The outcome was self-assessed knowledge. Finding an explanation and being able to reproduce it from memory are different accomplishments (Fisher et al., 2015). A feed full of intriguing clues and a search result that seems instantly familiar can both make it easy to confuse an engaging encounter with understanding.

Can we encourage curiosity?

In two preregistered experiments with 501 and 511 participants, Frede et al. (2026) asked adults to take a test on elephant conservation, then decide which sections of an article to read. Showing people where their initial knowledge was partial made them more likely to read sections covering those topics. For those topics, test scores improved more than in the comparison group in the second experiment, when participants were told a further test would follow. The decision to read was observable, but it could reflect both curiosity and preparation for an expected test.

Park et al. (2026) randomly assigned 103 children aged five to seven to practise asking questions or listening carefully in eight one-to-one science lessons. The question-asking group subsequently traded more stickers for access to new science information. The groups showed no reliable overall difference in science learning or in the number of questions asked on a new task. Some gains varied with prior knowledge. The outcome depends on which behaviour is being measured and how closely it resembles the activity the children practised.

One application would be to start with an observation learners can interpret, ask them what remains unresolved and give them a way to investigate. Two puddles in the same playground might dry at different rates. Learners could suggest which features of their surroundings matter and decide what to measure. The example applies findings about making a gap visible and giving people room to pursue a question. Its value in a particular classroom would depend on what the learners already know and whether they can use the evidence they gather.

Why humans seek understanding

The brass key mattered once you knew enough to wonder where it fitted. Your attention stayed with a missing part of the story, and the prospect of an answer gave you a reason to keep looking. Curiosity grows out of that interaction between knowledge, uncertainty, attention, motivation and the systems that help us learn what is worth pursuing.

Suppose the key opened a cupboard beneath the projection booth. That might finish the story you were told. It might also make you wonder who hid the key behind the screen, and what they thought the next person to find it would do. Sometimes discovery gives us the first question we could never have asked before.

Written by Arkadiusz Dawidowicz.

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