Neural responses to state curiosity in young children

Curiosity scaffolds children’s exploration and learning. Yet, the neural mechanisms of curiosity-modulated learning in children remain unclear. Here, we designed an fMRI task to test how curiosity, as defined by children’s self-reported excitement about learning information, modulates memory and neural activity in 5- to 8-year-olds (n = 60 with behavioral data, n = 51 with fMRI). We observed greater learning when children reported more curiosity. In whole-brain analyses, high-curiosity was associated with greater activation in inferior frontal gyrus, lateral occipital cortex, the thalamus, and the putamen. Curiosity did not modulate activation in preregistered regions of interest (dorsal attention network, hippocampus, nucleus accumbens) but did modulate activation in an exploratory region of interest, the amygdala. Multivariate searchlight decoding revealed local activity patterns that reliably distinguished reported curiosity levels in dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, fusiform gyrus, angular gyrus, precuneus, and cerebellum. Together, these findings suggest that curiosity enhances engagement of language, visual, and attention-related regions during learning in children.