e28: The Case for Curiosity
Thursday, April 17th, 2025
18:30-20:00 GMT (London, UK) • 1:30-3:00pm EST (North America, Eastern)
Curiosity as a driver of creativity and aesthetic experience
This month we'll engage in a more theoretical discussion, examining the psychological and neuroscientific similarities between three phenomena rarely studied together: curiosity, creativity, and aesthetic experience! By supporting information-seeking behaviours and openness to experience, curiosity is argued to be a common motivator of creative and aesthetic engagement.
We will use the following review paper as a starting point for our discussion:
A Thirst for Knowledge: Grounding Curiosity, Creativity, and Aesthetics in Memory and Reward Neural Systems. by Kennett et al. (2023).
This meeting has passed, but we would love for you to join us next time!
📄 Kenett, Humphries & Chatterjee (2023)
A Thirst for Knowledge: Grounding Curiosity, Creativity, and Aesthetics in Memory and Reward Neural Systems. Creativity Research Journal, 35(3), 412-426.
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Curiosity, creativity, and aesthetics are typically studied separately. The extent to which they share psychological and neural mechanisms is not well understood, despite all being linked to broader personality characteristics like Openness to Experience and are driven by a desire for information and knowledge. Here, we review evidence and advance the hypothesis that creative and aesthetic experiences depend on curiosity as a driver of information-seeking and exploratory behavior because they are exemplars of situations that highlight gaps in knowledge or require problem finding and solving. At the psychological level, we link curiosity, creativity, and aesthetics to Openness to Experience and to ones’ semantic memory. We demonstrate how Openness is a critical personality trait in enhancing curious behaviors, as well as creative and aesthetic acts. Furthermore, we highlight the role of semantic memory in such information-seeking behavior, leading to knowledge acquisition. At the neural level, we examine the neurobiological underpinnings of these constructs in relation to the mesolimbic dopaminergic reward system, as related to information-seeking. Finally, we link creativity and aesthetic experience and discuss how stages of art viewing and making relate to curiosity. Thus, we argue that information-seeking, the key behavior attributed to curiosity, motivates both creative and aesthetic activities.
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First Author's Lab Link →
Cognitive Complexity Laboratory:
https://cognitive-complexity.net.technion.ac.il/
Other author labs/programs →
Goldsmith’s PANC: https://www.gold.ac.uk/pg/msc-psychology-arts-neuroaesthetics-creativity/
Penn Center for Neuroaesthetics: https://neuroaesthetics.med.upenn.edu/
👋🏼 Please don’t hesitate to reach out if you need a pdf of the article.