Jordan A. Litman

University of Maine at Machias (UMM), ME & Institute of Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC)

If a user is presented an AI system that portends to explain how it works, how do we know whether the explanation works and the user has achieved a pragmatic understanding of the AI? This question entails some key concepts of measurement such as explanation goodness and trust. We present methods for enabling developers and researchers to: (1) Asses...

This material is approved for public release. Distribution is unlimited. This material is based on research sponsored by the Air Force Research Lab (AFRL) under agreement number FA8650-17-2-7711. The U.S. Government is authorized to reproduce and distribute reprints for Governmental purposes notwithstanding any copyright notation thereon. The views...

This paper focuses on the emergent importance of curiosity at work for individuals and organizations by reviewing management research on curiosity at work. We start by leveraging prior reviews on early and contemporary foundations of the curiosity construct in the larger psychological literature, with a focus on definitional clarity, dimen-sionalit...

Epistemic curiosity (EC) is the motive and need to seek knowledge. The present work entails validation of the English EC Scale translated in the Hindi language. Study 1 comprised confirmatory factor analysis of the Hindi scale using a sample of 223 bilingual Indians (143 females). The 10-item 2-factor structure with Interest and Deprivation subscal...

The Cambridge Handbook of Motivation and Learning - by K. Ann Renninger February 2019

The question addressed in this paper is: If we present to a user an AI system that explains how it works, how do we know whether the explanation works and the user has achieved a pragmatic understanding of the AI? In other words, how do we know that an explanainable AI system (XAI) is any good? Our focus is on the key concepts of measurement. We di...

2016 Gold Award for Cultivating Curiosity

Intrapersonal Curiosity (InC) involves inquisitively introspecting to better understand one’s inner self. A pool of 39 face-valid InC items was administered to 1005 participants, along with other curiosity, personality, self-awareness, self-regulation, and psychological well-being scales. Three InC factors with good model fit were identified, from...

During periods of developmental crisis, individuals experience uncomfortable internal incongruence and are motivated to reduce this through forms of exploration of self, other and world. Based on this, we inferred that being in a crisis would relate positively to curiosity and negatively to a felt sense of authenticity. A quasi-experimental design...

Relationships between Interest (I) and Deprivation (D) type epistemic curiosity (EC) and self-regulation were evaluated in two studies. In Study 1 (Italians, N = 151), I-type EC correlated positively with positive outcome-expectancies and risk-taking, but negatively with thinking about negative outcomes. D-type EC correlated positively with emotion...

Epistemic curiosity (EC) is the desire to obtain new knowledge capable of either producing positive experiences of intellectual interest (I-type) or of reducing undesirable conditions of informational deprivation (D-type). Although researchers acknowledge that there are individual differences in young children's epistemic curiosity, there are no ex...

Epistemic curiosity is theorized to underlie the adoption of learning goals, studying strategies, and skill development critical to becoming a successful physician. However, there is relatively little research regarding the measurement of epistemic curiosity in medical learners. We administered the I- and D-type curiosity and Need For Cognition (NF...

Three studies were conducted to evaluate the validity of the interest (I) and deprivation (D) type epistemic curiosity (EC) distinction in three German samples. In Study 1 (N = 395) and Study 2 (N = 191), responses to German translations of the Epistemic Curiosity Scale and the Curiosity as a Feeling-of-Deprivation Scale were submitted to confirmat...

Epistemic curiosity is theorized to underlie the adoption of learning goals, studying strategies, and skill development critical to becoming a successful physician. However, there is relatively little research regarding the measurement of epistemic curiosity in medical learners. We administered the I-and D-type curiosity and Need For Cognition (NFC...

Curiosity, a personality trait underlying behavioral tendencies related to knowledge acquisition, learning, and thinking, can be expected to be of high relevance in the world of work. There is, however, to date no work-related curiosity measure. The present article reports results regarding the development and validation of the new 10-item Work-Rel...

Understanding the complex nature of human behavior requires consideration of how we mentally represent past experiences, respond to present events, and prepare for future events. This article focuses on the last of these: planning and goal-setting. To be able to carry out, effectively, behaviors necessary to achieve future goals requires planning....

Planning involves the mental representation of future goals and devising steps to achieve them. Early research on planning emphasized reducing discrepancies between undesirable and preferred states. Recent research expanded this idea to include consideration of goal specificity, time frame, and difficulty. The findings of modern research point to f...

We review the consensus of expert opinion concerning the psychology of intelligence analysis, as a form of critical thinking. This consensus details a number of ways in which the cognitive work is difficult. Many senior analysts have commented upon the requirements of intelligence analysis – the reasoning traps to which novices fall victim, and the...

In Study 1, 20 incurious worry reduction motive (IWRM) items were administered to 280 participants along with curiosity and worry scales. With factor analysis, two six-item scales were developed: focus on distress (IWRM-FD) and focus on relief (IWRM-FR). IWRM-FD was associated with wanting positive news about threats, whereas IWRM-FR was related to...

Two studies were conducted to evaluate the validity of the Interest (I) and Deprivation (D) type epistemic curiosity (EC) distinction in non-students. In Study 1 (N=263), responses to two EC measures, the Epistemic Curiosity Scale (ECS; Litman & Spielberger, 2003) and the Curiosity as a Feeling-of-Deprivation Scale (CFDS; Litman & Jimerson, 2004) w...

In two studies, hypotheses suggested by Litman’s (2005) wanting-liking model of information-seeking were tested. In Study 1 (N = 372) relationships between measures of dispositional Interest- (I) and Deprivation- (D) type curiosity, ambiguity tolerance (AT), and negative affectivity were examined. Consistent with the wanting-liking model, AT correl...

In dealing with a stressful event, 440 participants reported how frequently they used a variety of different coping strategies, rated their separate impacts on problems and the associated emotions, and reported their effects on subsequent health and well-being. Coping strategies did not generally impact problems or emotions differently. Use of plan...

A sample of 504 Taiwanese participants (312 women, 192 men) responded to a pool of translated Attitudes Towards Gossip (ATG) scale items. Factor analyses identified two factors reflecting attitudes about gossip's Social Value (SV) and Moral Value (MV), which provided the basis for constructing a 10-item Chinese (C) ATG scale. C-ATG scale scores wer...

Curiosity is the intrinsic desire for new knowledge that motivates information seeking behavior. Recent research suggests that metacognitive judgments about the extent to which one knows something influences whether curiosity is aroused, curiosity's phenomenology, the intensity of curiosity states, and curiosity's motivational impact on information...

The extent to which two measures of epistemic curiosity (EC), the Epistemic Curiosity Scale (ECS; Litman & Spielberger, 2003) and the curiosity as a Feeling-of-Deprivation Scale (CFDS; Litman & Jimerson, 2004), differentiated between interest (I) and deprivation (D) type curiosity was examined in four studies. In studies 1 (N=725) and 2 (N=658), ex...

Interpersonal curiosity (IPC) is the desire for new information about people. Fifty-one IPC items were administered to 321 participants (248 women, 73 men), along with other measures of curiosity and personality. Three factors were identified from which five-item subscales were developed that had good internal consistency: Curiosity about Emotions,...

Curiosity is the intrinsic desire to know, to see, or to experience that motivates information seeking behavior. Historically, there are two major theoretical accounts of curiosity: The first conceptualizes curiosity as a drive state that motivates information seeking aimed at reducing unpleasant feelings related to uncertainty; the second views cu...

The present study investigated variables related to errors in predicting when tasks will be completed. Participants (N = 184) responded to the Time Structure Questionnaire (TSQ; Jones, Banicky, Pomare, & Lasane, 1999) and Temporal Orientation Scale (TOS; Bond & Feather, 1988) and predicted when they would complete either a desirable or undesirable...

Two studies evaluated the dimensionality of the COPE inventory (Carver, Scheier, & Weintraub, 1989) and examined its relationships with approach- and avoidance-motives and positive and negative traits. In Study 1, four coping factors emerged, three of which reflected either self-sufficient or socially-supported coping strategies, along with an avoi...

To evaluate Litman and Jimerson's (2004) Interest/Deprivation (I/D) model of curiosity, 355 students (269 women, 86 men) responded to 6 trait curiosity measures including the Curiosity/Interest in the World scale (C/IW; Peterson & Seligman, 2004), the Curiosity and Exploration Inventory (CEI; Kashdan, Rose, & Fincham, 2004), the Perceptual Curiosit...

To determine if sensory curiosity (SC) could be identified as a meaningful psychological construct, a pool of SC items was administered to 552 undergraduate students (402 women, 150 men), along with measures of perceptual and epistemic curiosity. Participants also responded to the trait anxiety, anger, and curiosity scales of the State-Trait Person...

This paper proposes a new theoretical model of curiosity that incorporates the neuroscience of “wanting” and “liking”, which are two systems hypothesised to underlie motivation and affective experience for a broad class of appetites. In developing the new model, the paper discusses empirical and theoretical limitations inherent to drive and optimal...

The present study investigated how knowledge‐gaps, measured by feeling‐of‐knowing, and individual differences in epistemic curiosity contribute to the arousal of state curiosity and exploratory behaviour for 265 (210 women, 55 men) university students. Participants read 12 general knowledge questions, reported the answer was either known (“I Know”)...

Four studies were conducted to develop and validate a measure of individual differences in attitudes towards gossip (ATG). In Study 1, exploratory factor analyses of responses to a pool of ATG items iden-tified two factors reflecting attitudes about gossipÕs Social Value (SV) and Moral Value (MV), which pro-vided the basis for constructing a 12-ite...

Curiosity as a feeling of deprivation (CFD) reflects feelings of uncertainty and tension that motivate information-seeking and problem-solving behavior. Twenty-seven CFD items were administered to 321 participants (248 women, 73 men) along with other measures of curiosity and other personality traits such as anxiety, anger, and depression. Factor a...

Perceptual curiosity, as defined by Berlyne (1954), involves interest in and giving attention to novel perceptual stimulation, and motivates visual and sensory-inspection. A 33-item questionnaire constructed to assess individual differences in perceptual curiosity was administered to 320 undergraduate students (202 females; 118 males). The particip...

A questionnaire constructed to assess epistemic curiosity (EC) and perceptual curiosity (PC) curiosity was administered to 739 undergraduates (546 women, 193 men) ranging in age from 18 to 65. The study participants also responded to the trait anxiety, anger, depression, and curiosity scales of the State-Trait Personality Inventory (STPI; Spielberg...

Thesis (M.A.)--University of South Florida, 1998. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 49-52).

Includes vita. Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of South Florida, 2000. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 73-82).