Dr Francesco Poli | Curiosity and the dynamics of human exploration

Curiosity is a cornerstone of human development. It shapes how we explore, learn, and construct increasingly complex knowledge systems from infancy onward, and fuels the scientific and technological achievements that distinguish our species. Yet despite its centrality, curiosity remains poorly understood: it is underspecified in theory, underexplored experimentally, and rarely studied systematically across development. I propose a model-based framework that treats curiosity as a multidimensional construct and tracks the moment-by-moment dynamics of its constituent processes. Within this framework, I will present a series of learning and exploration tasks that quantify how different components of curiosity map onto behaviour in infants, children, and adults. This integrated modelling and experimental approach will reveal how curiosity changes across development, how it varies between individuals, and how these differences shape learning.