Knowledge Gap Illustrations Spark Curiosity

Knowledge gaps elicit curiosity and increase people’s willingness to invest resources in seeking information to close them. While previous research used confidence ratings to implicitly infer knowledge gaps, the impact of making these gaps explicitly salient to people on their information-seeking behavior remains unclear. Here, we investigated this question across two preregistered experiments (Experiment 1: n = 501, Experiment 2: n = 511 participants). Participants first took a knowledge test on elephant conservation in Botswana. Subsequently, participants repeatedly decided to either read or skip a chapter of an article covering different subtopics on elephant conservation in Botswana, before they took the same test again. We manipulated the salience of knowledge gaps by illustrating pretest performance scores to the experimental group, while the control group received no such information. In Experiment 2, we instructed participants after the pretest that a posttest would follow at the end of the experiment and thereby intended to increase the utility of information seeking. Our results provide converging evidence that illustrating moderate knowledge gaps significantly increased participants’ probability of seeking information by reading the chapters. In Experiment 2, illustrating moderate knowledge gaps was not only associated with increased information-seeking behavior, but also led to significantly greater gains in posttest performance compared to the control group. Altogether, our findings open new avenues for research on leveraging knowledge gap illustrations to deliberately stimulate curiosity, thereby increasing information-seeking behavior and knowledge acquisition.