Kou Murayama

University of Reading · School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences

Videos of magic tricks offer lots of opportunities to study the human mind. They violate the expectations of the viewer, causing prediction errors, misdirect attention, and elicit epistemic emotions. Herein we describe and share the Magic, Memory, and Curiosity (MMC) Dataset where 50 participants watched 36 magic tricks filmed and edited specifical...

Despite having little economic utility, people are sometimes motivated to seek challenges (i.e., proactively choosing to work on a more difficult task than an easier one). The present study investigated whether just observing others’ challenge-seeking behaviors could motivate people to seek more challenging tasks—the social contagion effect of chal...

Many empirical studies have found a curvilinear (inverted U) relationship be- tween knowledge and curiosity, such that curiosity is induced when stimuli are neither unknown but nor too familiar. Various theoretical accounts have been proposed to explain this phenomenon. However, these theoretical accounts have been discussed independently, and rese...

Researchers have focused extensively on understanding the factors influencing students’ academic achievement over time. However, existing longitudinal studies have often examined only a limited number of predictors at one time, leaving gaps in our knowledge about how these predictors collectively contribute to achievement beyond prior performance a...

Previous research suggests that curiosity is sometimes induced by novel information one has no relevant knowledge about, but it is sometimes induced by new information about something that one is familiar with and has prior knowledge about. However, the conditions under which novelty or familiarity triggers curiosity remain unclear. Using metacogni...

We often seek information without any explicit incentives or goals (i.e., noninstrumental information seeking, often noted as a manifestation of curiosity). Does noninstrumental information-seeking change with age? We tried to answer the question by making a critical distinction between two information-seeking behaviors: diversive information seeki...

Psychological research on human motivation repeatedly observed that approach goals (i.e., goals to attain success) increase task enjoyment and intrinsic motivation more strongly than avoidance goals (i.e., goals to avoid failure). The present study sought to address how the reward network in the brain—including the striatum and ventromedial prefron...

Curiosity – the desire to seek information – is fundamental for learning and performance. Studies on curiosity have shown that people are intrinsically motivated to seek information even if it does not bring an immediate tangible benefit (i.e., non-instrumental information), but little is known as to whether people have the metacognitive capability...

We investigated spaced retrieval and restudying in 3 preregistered, online experiments. In all experiments, participants studied 40 Swahili–English word pair translations during an initial study phase, restudied intact pairs or attempted to retrieve the English words to Swahili cues twice in three spaced practice sessions, and then completed a fina...

This study examined how adolescents' emotions in mathematics develop over time. Growth curve modeling was applied to longitudinal data collected annually from 2002 to 2006 (Grades 5-9; N = 3425 German adolescents; Mage = 11.7, 15.6 years at the first and last waves, respectively; 50.0% female). Results indicated that enjoyment and pride decreased o...

Despite the benefits of eating insects (entomophagy), Western society is often inclined to reject this practice based on initial reactions of disgust. It is suggested there is potential to overcome this attitude through increasing interest and gaining knowledge of the benefits. One way to accomplish this is through an adapted utility-value interven...

In psychology, researchers often predict a dependent variable (DV) consisting of multiple measurements (e.g., scale items measuring a concept). To analyze the data, researchers typically aggregate (sum/average) scores across items and use this as a DV. Alternatively, they may define the DV as a common factor using structural equation modeling. Howe...

Although individuals generally avoid negative information, recent research documents that they voluntarily explore negative information to resolve uncertainty. However, it remains unclear (a) whether uncertainty facilitates exploration similarly when exploration is expected to lead to negative, neutral, or positive information, and (b) whether olde...

Although studies have documented the importance of basic psychological need satisfaction in parent–child relationships, a gap remains in understanding how parent and adolescent need satisfaction are associated. Using two longitudinal intergenerational data sets (200 parent–adolescent dyads and 408 mother–adolescent dyads; two waves), we examined wh...

Motivation science has advanced tremendously in the past decade. However, it is now clear that future progress is going to be stalled by the extent of disagreement among motivation scientists to some basic, yet controversial, questions. To help move motivation science toward greater coherence, the editors recruited prominent scholars to debate thei...

Most studies on autonomy support and controlling parenting rely on children’s perceptions, despite the limitations of this approach. This study investigated congruency between autonomy support and controlling parenting reported by mothers and adolescents and their association with adolescents’ depressive symptoms via basic psychological needs satis...

The hedonism principle assumes that people pursue pleasure and positive experiences; however, we often observe that people voluntarily seek negative experiences in various daily settings—sometimes interpreted as the manifestation of “morbid curiosity.” This study attempted to test three hypotheses on novelty/curiosity, metacognitive miscalibration,...

Unlabelled: Research has shown that we are endowed with a remarkable capacity to motivate ourselves in the absence of extrinsic incentives (i.e. intrinsic motivation). However, little research has been conducted to investigate whether we accurately appreciate the power of intrinsic motivation. The current research aimed to examine the metacognitiv...

Human memory is selective and not all experiences are remembered. Both monetary rewards/incentives and curiosity have been found to motivate and facilitate learning by dopaminergic midbrain projections to the hippocampus during encoding. In this study, we examined potential brain mechanisms during early consolidation period that jointly or independ...

Economic and decision-making theories suppose that people would disengage from a task with near zero success probability, because this implicates little normative utility values. However, humans often are motivated for an extremely challenging task, even without any extrinsic incentives. The current study aimed to address the nature of this challen...

Counterfactual information, information about what might have been, forms the content of counterfactual thoughts and emotions like regret and relief. Recent research suggests that human adults and children, as well as rhesus monkeys, demonstrate ‘counterfactual curiosity’: they are motivated to seek out counterfactual information after making decis...

Existing theoretical frameworks on motivation have identified a number of critical components in our motivational engagement process in learning. However, little empirical research has examined how these different components interact with each other to support our overall motivational engagement. This study explores such dynamics in a bottom-up man...

Mastery-approach (MAP) goals, focusing on developing competence and acquiring task mastery, are posited to be the most optimal, beneficial type of achievement goal for academic and life outcomes. Although there is meta-analytic evidence supporting this finding, such evidence does not allow us to conclude that the extant MAP goal findings generalize...

A large body of research has shown that parents play a vital role in the development of adolescents' depression. However, previous research has overlooked the effects of a potentially critical factor, namely, parental perceptions, and beliefs about adolescents' depression. The present study examined whether parental perceptions of an adolescent's d...

Emotion-laden events and objects are typically better remembered than neutral ones. This is usually explained by stronger functional coupling in the brain evoked by emotional content. However, most research on this issue has focused on functional connectivity evoked during or after learning. The effect of an individual’s functional connectivity at...

The ability to engage in internal thoughts without external stimulation is a unique characteristic in humans. The current research tested the hypothesis that people metacognitively underestimate their capability to enjoy this process of "just thinking." Participants (university students; total N = 259) were asked to sit and wait in a quiet room wit...

Humans constantly search for and use information to solve a wide range of problems related to survival, social interactions, and learning. While it is clear that curiosity and the drive for knowledge occupies a central role in defining what being human means to ourselves, where does this desire to know the unknown come from? What is its purpose? An...

Three studies on the relationship between curiosity and interest were reported. The first study was a meta-analysis that examined the Pearson correlations between scales assessing curiosity and interest. Based on 24 studies (31 effect sizes), we found that the curiosity scales correlated with the interest scales at a moderate level (r = .53), but t...

This study examined whether engaging in physical exercise during a university class would have beneficial effect on students’ learning motivation. One hundred and forty-nine participants took part in a psychology class over nine weeks (one lesson per week); for each lesson, participants engaged in a three-minute physical activity (low-intensity aer...

In psychology, researchers often predict a dependent variable (DV) consisting of multiple measurements (e.g., scale items measuring a concept, or reaction times to stimuli). To analyze the data, researchers typically aggregate (sum/average) scores across items and use this as a DV. Alternatively, they may define the DV as a common factor using stru...

Mastery-approach (MAP) goals, focusing on developing competence and acquiring task mastery, is posited to be the most optimal, beneficial type of achievement goal for academic and life outcomes. Although there is meta-analytic evidence supporting this finding, such evidence does not allow us to conclude that the extant MAP goal findings generalize...

Researchers studying curiosity and interest note a lack of consensus in whether and how these important motivations for learning are distinct. Empirical attempts to distinguish them are impeded by this lack of conceptual clarity. Following a recent proposal that curiosity and interest are folk concepts, we sought to determine a non-expert consensus...

Entomophagy – the consumption of insects – is often rejected by Western society despite its benefits over traditional animal-based proteins. While several factors have been identified as potential predictors of people's willingness to try insect foods, this study introduced an under-explored factor: curiosity, which is a powerful motivator of behav...

Nested data structures create statistical dependence that influences the effective sample size and statistical power of a study. Several methods are available for dealing with nested data, including the summary-statistics approach and multilevel modelling (MLM). Recent publications have heralded MLM as the best method for analysing nested data, cla...

A simulation experiment to confirm the validity of summary-statistics approaches for analysing nested data

This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note...

The purpose of this study was to critically examine how people perceive the definitions, differences and similarities of interest and curiosity, and address the subjective boundaries between interest and curiosity. We used a qualitative research approach given the research questions and the goal to develop an in-depth understanding of people’s mean...

Emotional public events, relative to nonemotional ones, are typically remembered more accurately, more vividly, and with more confidence. However, the majority of previous studies investigating this have focused on negative public events and less is known about positive ones. The current study examined whether positive and negative public events we...

While studies have documented the importance of basic psychological need satisfaction in parent-child relationships, a gap remains in understanding how parental and adolescent need satisfactions are associated. Using two longitudinal intergenerational datasets (200 parent-adolescent dyads and 408 mother-adolescent dyads; two waves), the study exami...

Researchers studying curiosity and interest note a lack of consensus in whether and how these important motivations for learning are distinct. Empirical attempts to distinguish them are impeded by this lack of conceptual clarity. Following a recent proposal that curiosity and interest are folk concepts, we sought to determine a non-expert consensus...

After you make a decision, it is sometimes possible to seek information about how things would be if you had acted otherwise. We investigated the lure of this counterfactual information, namely, counterfactual curiosity. In a set of five experiments (total N = 150 adults), we used an adapted Balloon Analogue Risk Task with varying costs of informat...

Research has shown that focused attention meditation not only improves our cognitive and motivational functioning (e.g., attention, mental health), it influences the way our brain networks [e.g., default mode network (DMN), fronto-parietal network (FPN), and sensory-motor network (SMN)] function and operate. However, surprisingly little attention h...

Friends are sometimes similar in their academic motivation. The current study examines the mechanisms underlying similarity by disentangling selection and influence processes in adolescent friendship networks, using longitudinal data. A total of 495 adolescents from an independent school for girls were assessed for their academic motivation (includ...

Humans are known to seek non-instrumental information, sometimes expending considerable effort or taking risks to receive it, for example, ‘curiosity killed the cat’. This suggests that information is highly motivationally salient. In the current article, we first review recent empirical studies that demonstrated the strong motivational lure of cur...

The relationships and differences between curiosity and interest have received considerable attention and discussions. Yet, most of the discussions so far draw from little direct empirical evidence. In this set of three studies, the relationship between curiosity and interest were examined. The first study was a meta-analysis that examined the Pear...

Social rewards are a broad and heterogeneous set of stimuli including for instance smiling faces, gestures, or praise. They have been widely investigated in cognitive and social neuroscience as well as psychology. Research often contrasts the neural processing of social rewards with non-social ones, with the aim to demonstrate the privileged and un...

The ability to engage in internal thoughts without external stimulation is one of the hallmarks of unique characteristics in humans. The current research tested the hypothesis that people metacognitively underestimate their capability to positively engage in just thinking. Participants were asked to sit and wait in a quiet room without doing anythi...

The ability to engage in internal thoughts without external stimulation is one of the hallmarks of unique characteristics in humans. The current research tested the hypothesis that people metacognitively underestimate their capability to positively engage in just thinking. Participants were asked to sit and wait in a quiet room without doing anythi...

There has been considerable interest in empirical research on epistemic emotions, i.e., emotions related to knowledge-generating qualities of cognitive tasks and activities such as curiosity, interest, and surprise. One big challenge when studying epistemic emotions is systematically inducting these emotions in restricted experimental settings. The...

Maintaining emotional well-being in late life is crucial for achieving successful and healthy aging. While previous research from Western cultures has documented that emotional well-being improves as individuals get older, previous research provided mixed evidence on the effects of age on well-being in Eastern Asian cultures. However, previous stud...

Previous research suggests that the proximity of individuals in a social network predicts how similarly their brains respond to naturalistic stimuli. However, the relationship between social connectedness and brain connectivity in the absence of external stimuli has not been examined. To investigate whether neural homophily between friends exists a...

Researchers studying curiosity and interest note a lack of consensus in how these important concepts that motivate learning are defined. One proposal is that curiosity and interest are naïve concepts, intuitively and subjectively constructed by people to express underlying psychological processes to which they lack introspective access. Thus, there...

Curiosity is often portrayed as a desirable feature of human faculty. However, curiosity may come at a cost that sometimes puts people in harmful situations. Here, using a set of behavioural and neuroimaging experiments with stimuli that strongly trigger curiosity (for example, magic tricks), we examine the psychological and neural mechanisms under...

Emotional public events, relative to non-emotional ones, are typically remembered more accurately, more vividly and with more confidence. Such memories are referred to as flashbulb memories. However, the majority of previous studies on this phenomenon have focused on negative public events and less is known about positive ones. The current study ex...

Interest is an important motivational element for learning in the school environment. However, little research has directly addressed how interest changes over time as knowledge accumulates. To gain a better understanding of how knowledge acquisition influences intraindividual change of interest, we developed a novel paradigm in which participants...

Humans are known to seek non-instrumental information, sometimes expending considerable effort or taking risks to receive it, e.g. “curiosity killed the cat”. This suggests that information is highly motivationally salient. In the current article, we first review recent empirical studies that demonstrated the strong motivational lure of curiosity –...

Social rewards are a broad and heterogeneous set of stimuli, which have been widely investigated in cognitive and social neuroscience/psychology. Research often contrasts the neural processing of social rewards with non-social ones, with the aim to demonstrate the privileged and unique nature of social rewards or to examine shared neural processing...

Simultaneous multi-slice (SMS) imaging is a popular technique for increasing acquisition speed in echo-planar imaging (EPI) fMRI. However, SMS data are prone to motion sensitivity and slice leakage artefacts, which spread signal between simultaneously acquired slices. Relevant to motion sensitivity, artefacts from moving anatomic structures propaga...

Expectancy-value theory (EVT) is a popular framework to understand and improve students' motivation. Unfortunately, limited research has verified whether EVT predictions generalize to students with low levels of cognitive ability. This study relies on Grade 5 and 8 data from 177 students with low levels of cognitive ability and a matched sample of...

Curiosity - the drive for information - is often perceived as a dangerous trait. This is exacerbated by the perception that when something is forbidden, curiosity towards it increases. Surprisingly little is known about the mechanisms by which this forbidden fruit effect occurs. In a series of five experiments (total N = 2,141), we used a novel car...

The Keio Twin Research Center (KoTReC) was established in 2009 at Keio University to combine two longitudinal cohort projects — the Keio Twin Study (KTS) for adolescence and adulthood and the Tokyo Twin Cohort Project (ToTCoP) for infancy and childhood. KoTReC also conducted a two-time panel study of self-control and psychopathology in twin adolesc...

Recent years have seen considerable interest in empirical research on epistemic emotions, i.e. emotions related to knowledge-generating qualities of cognitive tasks and activities such as curiosity, interest, and surprise. One big challenge when studying epistemic emotions is systematically inducting these emotions in restricted experimental settin...

Adolescents’ depressive symptoms are affected by a number of factors including life stress, gender, socio-economic status, and parental depression symptoms. However, little is known about whether adolescent depressive symptoms are also affected by parental motivational characteristics. The current study explores the relationship between parental mo...

Previous studies suggested roles for curiosity and interest in knowledge acquisition and exploration, but there has been a long-standing debate about how to define these concepts and whether they are related or different. In this paper, we address the definition issue by arguing that there is inherent difficulty in defining curiosity and interest,...

The study described here developed a short surrogate index for the children’s socioeconomic status (SES) using house possessions and investigated its validity. In Study 1, 192 pairs of parents and their middle school-aged children participated in a questionnaire survey. Based on the results, three items regarding possessions at home were selected f...

Research has started to acknowledge the importance of emotions for complex learning and cognitive performance. However, research on epistemic emotions has only recently become more prominent. Research in educational psychology in particular has mostly focused on examining achievement emotions instead of epistemic emotions. Furthermore, only few stu...

Economic and decision-making theories suppose that people would disengage from an extremely difficult task, because such a task does not implicate any normative utility values (i.e. success probability is almost zero). However, humans are often motivated for an extremely challenging task with little chance of success, even without any extrinsic inc...

Previous research suggests that the proximity of individuals in a social network predicts how similarly their brains respond to naturalistic stimuli. However, the relationship between social connectedness and brain connectivity in the absence of external stimuli has not been examined. To investigate whether neural homophily between friends exists a...

Longitudinal designs provide a strong inferential basis for uncovering reciprocal effects or causality between variables. For this analytic purpose, a cross-lagged panel model (CLPM) has been widely used in medical research, but the use of the CLPM has recently been criticized in methodological literature because parameter estimates in the CLPM con...

After making a decision, it is sometimes possible to seek information about how things would be if one had acted otherwise. In the current study we investigated the seductive lure of this counterfactual information, namely counterfactual curiosity. We demonstrate in a set of five experiments using an adapted Balloon Analogue Risk Task with varying...

The Oxford Handbook of Human Motivation, Second Edition, addresses key advances made in the field since the previous edition, offering the latest insights from the top theorists and researchers of human motivation. The volume includes chapters on social learning theory, control theory, self-determination theory, terror management theory, and regula...

While traditional literature in psychology emphasized the critical distinction between interest (or curiosity) and extrinsic rewards (e.g. monetary rewards), this view has been challenged by recent neuroscientific evidence that the function of interest is little different from extrinsic rewards. In addition, researchers conceptualize curiosity and...