Curious Minds Wonder Alike: Studying Multimodal Behavioral Dynamics to Design Social Scaffolding of Curiosity

Curiosity is the strong desire to learn or know more about something or someone. Since learning is often a social endeavor, social dynamics in collaborative learning may inevitably influence curiosity. There is a scarcity of research, however, focusing on how curiosity can be evoked in group learning contexts. Inspired by a recently proposed theoretical framework [29] that articulates an integrated socio-cognitive infrastructure of curiosity, in this work, we use data-driven approaches to identify fine-grained social scaffolding of curiosity in child-child interaction, and propose how they can be used to elicit and maintain curiosity in technology-enhanced learning environments. For example, we discovered sequential patterns of multimodal behaviors across group members and we describe those that maximize an individual’s utility, or likelihood, of demonstrating curiosity during open-ended problem-solving in group work. We also discovered, and describe here, behaviors that directly or in a mediated manner cause curiosity related conversational behaviors in the interaction, with twice as many interpersonal causal influences compared to intrapersonal ones. We explain how these findings form a solid foundation for developing curiosity-increasing learning technologies or even assisting a human coach to induce curiosity among learners.