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Project B1: How does curiosity modulate the integration of sampled external information into internal models of the world? PRs: Michael Wibral, Anne Schacht Project B1 will investigate how curiosity impacts the information sampling processes humans use to enrich and extend their internal models of the world. The PhD researcher will use EEG/MEG data and information-theoretic approaches, to establish how curiosity influences what information we sense, and how we subsequently integrate it into our internal models. One potential additional focus of the project could be to explore inter-individual differences in the types of information-sampling strategies people employ.
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Project B2: Social and fitness benefits of curiosity in nonhuman primates PRs: Claudia Fichtel, Alexander Ecker Project B2 will explore the relationship between curiosity, learning, and fitness benefits in gray mouse lemurs. The PhD researcher will, together with the PIs, design a set of experiments that use ecologically relevant stimuli to operationalize curiosity in a wild population of gray mouse lemurs. They will test the hypothesis that how curiosity manifests itself, co-varies with cognitive performance and fitness proxies. The PhD researcher will collect their data at the German Primate Center (DPZ) field site at the Kirindy Forest in Madagascar. Computer vision and machine learning approaches will be used to identify the exploration strategies of the species.
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Project B3: Curiosity-driven learning in children’s reading behaviour and knowledge acquisition PR: Sascha Schroeder Project B3 will investigate the role curiosity plays in children’s reading choices, lexical development and knowledge acquisition. The PhD researcher will combine corpus analyses of children’s books with lab experiments and longitudinal studies, to achieve a comprehensive picture of how children’s curiosity affects their reading behavior and subsequent development.
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Project B4: Is there a curiosity boost in early category learning? PRs: Nivedita Mani, Alexander Ecker Project B4 will examine the factors that induce curiosity across early development and how these factors shape early word learning. In particular, the PhD researcher will, together with the PIs, devise a set of studies to examine how infants, young children and adults attend to objects in their environment, and examine how differences in attention shape the learning of novel labels for these objects. A particular focus is on the use of head-mounted eye-trackers to run studies in naturalistic interactions between children and their caregivers.
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