Kou Murayama - Knowledge as a sustainable source of internal rewards: How curiosity transforms into enduring interest

In recent years, interdisciplinary research on curiosity has surged, exploring how individuals naturally pursue knowledge without external incentives. However, this growing field has largely overlooked the extensive psychological research on interest development and trait curiosity/interest. This talk presents a unifying conceptual perspective, the reward-learning framework of knowledge acquisition (Murayama, 2022), which bridges these previously separate areas. The framework posits that knowledge acquisition acts as an intrinsic reward, reinforcing information-seeking behaviors through a reward-learning process. Importantly, this process can establish a positive feedback loop that sustains and amplifies information-seeking over time. This perspective offers a compelling explanation for how momentary curiosity can evolve into a long-term inclination for knowledge (trait curiosity/interest). This perspective also underscores the need to integrate semantic sense-making processes into decision-making models.