The curious case of learning through play : exploring curiosity in children and capuchin monkeys

Abstract

The inquisitive nature of humans has played a significant part in our cultural development and led to advancements in many areas of technology and science. However, despite the phenomenon provoking investigation from many areas of science (including neuroscience, personality, and AI research), it has received surprisingly little attention from evolutionary scientists. The term curiosity is intuitively understood, yet the literature struggles to define what is meant by curious behaviour. Due, in part, to this lack of a working definition of curiosity, and to the sparsity of research into curiosity in animals, it is a behavioural phenomenon which is yet to be convincingly documented in the animal kingdom. In this thesis I attempt to shine a light on the evolutionary roots of our seemingly unique desire to gather knowledge by approaching the topic from a comparative angle.

In my first chapter, I present my working definition of curiosity and detail how it breaks down into three key hallmarks of the behaviour; information seeking, learning, and intrinsic motivation. I then review the child development and animal behaviour literature to identify what is already known about the development and evolution of these three hallmarks. Next, in my second chapter I present a novel paradigm for investigating curiosity in a comparative setting and show that although young children appear to be intrinsically motivated to explore and learn from their exploration there are large individual differences. Whilst in capuchin monkeys, they appeared to require more autonomy than this initial study was able to provide. In the remaining empirical chapters I present follow-up tasks with the capuchin monkeys which explore the cognitive and motivational aspects of curiosity separately.

The data from this thesis suggests firstly that in the absence of any verbal priming, pre- schoolers are motivated to explore and spontaneously act to discover information about object properties which they are able to learn. Secondly, I find that capuchin monkeys will learn about object properties and show sensitivity to their functional relationships. Additionally, capuchins can detect a gap in their knowledge and perform selective information seeking. Finally, under intrinsically motivated conditions, capuchins are motivated to explore novel objects with limited evidence that during exploration they may learn object properties.