Examining curiosity and task performance in cybersecurity and computer science students

Curiosity is a multidimensional concept consisting of various constructs including interest-type curiosity (or joyous exploration) and deprivation-type curiosity (or deprivation sensitivity) that has been found to impact behavior in organizational contexts, such as the workplace and educational settings (Yow et al., 2022). The craft of cybersecurity hacking is said to be "led by curiosity" (Steinmetz, 2015, pp. 57). The current study examined interest-type and deprivation-type curiosity among computer science and cybersecurity students varying in self-reported levels of cybersecurity proficiency. In addition, participants completed a set of coding and debugging tasks to determine how proficiency and curiosity impacted performance. Deprivation-type curiosity was higher in participants with greater proficiency, but there was no difference in interest-type curiosity between individuals with more or less cybersecurity proficiency. In addition, participants with greater proficiency demonstrated greater accuracy and efficiency when completing the coding/debugging problems. Higher levels of deprivation-type curiosity may lead to greater persistence for learning, and a need to reduce tension or uncertainty, resulting in better performance on the coding/debugging task in the current study. Implications for including curiosity in college curriculum are discussed.