I watched a study on babys regarding their curiosity. It found that male
children were much more apt to become fustrated or angry if they could not
achieve their goal. The example I saw was:
A baby has a string in his/her hand, when they yank on the string, a noise or
a light go on. After the child made the association between pulling the
string and getting the result, the circuit was broken. The male babies
continued to pull, they would yank and yank, and got angry and frustrated
when the result was nil. The females on the other hand, gave up quickly and
did not seem to be nearly as adversly affected.
Now, did the females just reason that the string-light connection was
different now, or did they just care less? I dont know, but the differences
seemed accurate across a many babies, so there is probably some reason. I
wonder if this is related to the stress-reward concept.
Sodom
Bill Roh
Dan Plante wrote:
> At 02:42 PM 6/30/98 +0200, Andreas Engstrom wrote:
> >
> >Dan, do you know if any research has been made into this idea about
> >"curiosity" being caused by withdrawal of endorphines and "injection" of
> >stressors? It sounds plausible enough, but that could be said about lots
> >of things that have turned out to be wrong.. You don't happen to know of
> >any material related to this subject that are available on the web?
>
> I'm not aware of any research specific to this particular phenomenon,
> but from what I have kept track on in the fields of neural anatomy,
> cognitive science and the progress of imaging and data gathering
> technology such as CAT and MRI, it should be possible to confirm or
> refute it within about three years.
>
> By the way, FYI: It's not the stress reaction but the centre-seeking
> action itself that curiosity can be ascribed to. I know the concept is
> kind of difficult to fathom, I didn't get it at first when I was
> learning about the same negative-feedback phenomenon in analog circuit
> theory (voltage regulators, phase-locked-loops, etc.)
>
> Dan