Previous research showed that if information is considered relatively unimportant, curiosity follows an inverted U-shaped function of people's confidence ratings in knowledge about this information. However, if information is considered important, the relationship between curiosity and confidence is modulated and changes to a negative correlation (Spitzer et al., 2023). Furthermore, research has found that high curiosity increases people's willingness to invest time to access information. However, it remains unknown if people also decide to invest cognitive effort to access information. Here, we applied the curiosity paradigm introduced by Kang et al. (2009) to (i) replicate the relationship between curiosity, confidence, and perceived information importance and (ii) investigate whether participants would decide to respond to a set of random-dot kinematograms if they are curious to access information. We replicated previous findings on how information importance modulates the relationship between curiosity and confidence. We also found that participants decided to respond to random-dot kinematograms if they indicated to be curious about information. In addition to strengthening previous findings about information importance, our results suggest that individuals invest cognitive effort, in addition to time, if they are curious to access information.

References
Kang, M. J., Hsu, M., Krajbich, I. M., Loewenstein, G., McClure, S. M., Wang, J. T., & Camerer, C. F. (2009). The Wick in the Candle of Learning. Psychological Science, 20(8), 963–973.
Spitzer, M. W. H., Janz, J., Nie, M., & Kiesel, A. (2023). On the interplay of curiosity, confidence, and importance in knowing information. Psychological Research, 0123456789.