Rational Curiosity and Information-Seeking in the COVID-19 Pandemic

Curiosity is a powerful determinant of behavior. The past decade has seen a surge of scientific research on curiosity, an endeavor recently imbibed with urgency by the WHO, which set managing information-seeking as a public health goal during pandemics. And yet, a fundamental aspect of curiosity has remained unresolved: its relationship to utility. Is curiosity a drive towards information simply for the sake of obtaining that information, or is it a rational drive towards optimal learning? We leveraged people’s curiosity about COVID-19 to study information-seeking and learning in a large sample (n=5376) during the spring of 2020. Our findings reveal that curiosity is goal-rational in that it maximizes the personal utility of learning. Personal utility, unlike normative economic utility, is contingent on a person’s motivational state. On the basis of these findings, we explain information-seeking during the pandemic with a rational theoretical framework for curiosity.

The Development and Utilization of Red Cultural Resources

In recent years, red cultural resources, or visual, artifactual, institutional and other expressions of China’s revolutionary culture as well as the socialist culture fostered by the Chinese Communist Party since its founding, have been used to educate people, reduce poverty in older revolutionary areas where the resources are located, and enhance awareness of the practical utility of learning from history. At the same time, how best to develop and utilization red cultural resources has become a much-debated issue. In the context of this debate, a series of practical problems have emerged that urgently need to be solved. The present study argues that strengthening theoretical research; creating innovative infrastructural, technological, funding, and staffing solutions; improving institutional mechanisms; and strategically shaping the red brand will lead to a more rational and sustainable development of red cultural resources, maximizing their practical utility for Chinese society as a whole.

Young children consider the expected utility of others’ learning to decide what to teach

Direct instruction facilitates learning without the costs of exploration, yet teachers must be selective because not everything can nor needs to be taught. How do we decide what to teach, and what to leave for learners to discover? Here we investigate the cognitive underpinnings of the human ability to prioritise what to teach. We present a computational model that decides what to teach by maximising the learner's expected utility of learning from instruction and from exploration, and show that children (age 5-7) make decisions that are consistent with the model's predictions (i.e., minimising the learner's costs and maximising the rewards). Children flexibly considered either the learner's utility or their own depending on the context and even considered costs they had not personally experienced to decide what to teach. These results suggest that utility-based reasoning may play an important role in curating cultural knowledge by supporting selective transmission of high-utility information.