A1 Refereed original research article in a scientific journal
Curiosity and evidence quality affect information seeking and eye movements during reading; 
Authors: Simola, Jaana; Julku, Hanna; Dawson, Caitlin; Österman, Sebastian; Elovaara, Kaisa; Häikiö, Tuomo
Publisher: Elsevier
Publication year: 2026
Journal: Cognition
Article number: 106598
Volume: 274
ISSN: 0010-0277
eISSN: 1873-7838
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2026.106598
Publication's open availability at the time of reporting: Open Access
Publication channel's open availability : Partially Open Access publication channel
Web address : https://doi.org710.1016/j.cognition.2026.106598
Self-archived copy’s web address: https://research.utu.fi/converis/portal/detail/Publication/526742620
Self-archived copy's licence: CC BY
Self-archived copy's version: Publisher`s PDF
Curiosity is critical for learning and selective information processing, but it is unclear how it affects eye-movement patterns during reading. We tracked participants’ (n=56) eye movements in a task with 18 health-related questions. Each question was followed by up to 15 statements from three quality categories: scientific relevant (SR), scientific irrelevant (SI), and non-scientific relevant (NR). The statements were concealed in three boxes according to evidence quality. Participants could click on any box to reveal a new statement until they had read all the statements or were ready to answer the question. After reading a statement, participants rated their state curiosity and how useful the statement was for answering the question. The SR statements were rated highest on usefulness and were read most frequently, suggesting that participants were able to detect that these statements had the highest evidence quality. For a more comprehensive view on curiosity, we also measured participants’ trait curiosity with a questionnaire. We found that state curiosity correlated negatively with the thrill-seeking dimension of trait curiosity. Eye movements during statement reading were analyzed at the word-level, controlling for the effects of word length and frequency. Higher state curiosity was associated with lower word-skipping rates and longer total fixation duration on words, irrespective of evidence quality. However, the increase of total fixation duration with state curiosity was steeper for low quality (SI and NR) than high quality (SR) statements. Together, these results suggest that curiosity is related to a careful reading strategy, particularly for low-quality statements.
Keywords:
Curiosity, exploration-exploitation, eye-movements, information seeking
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Funding information in the publication:
This work was supported by the Strategic Research Council at the Academy of Finland [grant numbers: 335236 and 358272]. The funding source was not involved in the study design, collection, analysis and interpretation of data, writing the report and decision to submit the article for publication.