Curiosity is the human and animal urge to explore and discover new environments or to seek new knowledge (Schwartenbec,2019). This intrinsic need to know things is usually not just goal oriented as many experiments have demonstrated, clearly the joy and excitement of exploration appears to be motivation enough without the expectation of a reward (Modirshamechi,2023). Furthermore we make the distinction between novelty and surprise, they are two related but complementary concepts that each play a role in a curiosity driven process (Chadi,2023). In humans and animals curiosity may generate excitement at the prospect of discovering new knowledge or experiences. These emotions act as a driver for exploration perhaps taking individuals down paths they never anticipated or previously throught uninteresting. Although there is evidence that humans and animals seem to use both curiosity and reward policies combined with novelty as a further spur to motivation. Several cognitive science studies have attempted to experimentally induce curiosity and monitoring how a que or question can carry over and initiate interest in another topic, perhaps leading to creativity (Gross,2020).
Chadi MA, Mousannif H, Aamouche A (2023) Curiosity as a self-supervised method to improve exploration in de novo drug design. In: 2023 International Conference on Information Technology Research and Innovation (ICITRI), IEEE, p 151–156, DOI 10.1109/citri59340.2023.10249596, URL http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ICITRI59340.2023.10249596
Modirshanechi A, Kondraiwcz K, Gerstner W (2023) Curiosity-driven exploration: foundations in neuroscience and computational modelling. Trends in neuroscience 46:1054–1066
Schwartenbeck P, Passecker J, Hauser TU, FitzGerald TH, Kronbichler M, Friston KJ (2019) Computational mechanisms of curiosity and goal-directed exploration. eLife 8, DOI 10.7554/eLife.41703
Gross ME, Zedelius CM, Schooler JW (2020) Cultivating an understanding of curiosity as a seed for creativity. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences 35:77–82, DOI https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cobeha.2020.07.015