ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews classical psychological theories of curiosity, describes work implementing these theories in artificial learning systems and explores findings from developmental psychology that point towards a link between curiosity, attention and language at the earliest stages of development. The field of language acquisition benefits from a rich experimental literature. Critically, curiosity is likely also to be important to language acquisition, since the child is free to attend to linguistic and nonlinguistic stimuli and to extract information from this rich environment. However, findings from traditional experimental paradigms suggest that hearing language during learning can affect how children allocate their attention. Curiosity-driven behaviors therefore mediate between what the learner already knows and what is to be learned; that is, curiosity can determine what information is sought and when by determining how the child allocates his or her attention. Information gap approaches are therefore similar to incongruity approaches in that, in both, curiosity involves reducing a gap in knowledge about the world.
