An Experimental Study On The Influence Of Reward On College Students' Curiosity

Curiosity is a feeling that individuals are interested in new things early. The curiousness is cognitive emotion which beyond one’s expectation and satisfies his/her requirement that meet the world. The implicit and stable curiosity is showed by the form of emotion with curiosity(hereinafter referred to as curiousness) which is explicit and short in the specific context. Our research was aimed to explore the effect of rewards on curiosity when participant were undergraduates and materials were intellectual knowledge. In study 1, the independent variables were intrinsic rewards(the higher possibility of exceeding expectations vs. the lower possibility of exceeding expectations) and extrinsic rewards(1 point vs. 5 points vs. 10 points), and the dependent variables were curiousness rating scores and ACC. It was aimed to explore the effects of intrinsic and extrinsic rewards on curiousness. The results showed that there was an effect of intrinsic rewards and extrinsic rewards on curiousness. Further, intrinsic rewards had a more significant effect on the degree of curiousness and it also made it easier to individuals to remember something. In study 2, the independent variables were intrinsic rewards(the higher possibility of exceeding expectations vs. the middle possibility of exceeding expectation vs. the lower possibility of exceeding expectations), and the dependent variables were curiousness rating scores, ERPs and ACC. It was aimed to further explore the effects of intrinsic rewards on curiousness, and reveal the time course of curiousness induced by internal rewards. The results showed that:(1) further support on the generation mechanism of curiousness in “affective theory”, that is stimulus beyond expectation evoked curiousness;(2) internal rewards promote the cognitive processing through affecting curiousness, the specific performance for incidental memory enhancement;(3) higher internal rewards lead to less conflicts, and lower internal rewards lead to more;(4) under the condition of higher internal reward, individuals pay more attention to the task, the arousal is higher, in other hand, lower internal reward, less attention resources, lower arousal. In general, the curiousness is evoked by stimuli that beyond expectation, the curiousness itself may be mixed emotions, and the release of curiousness is internal reward, promoting the memory and learning.