Curiosity has a tumultuous past. Originally curiosity was considered a vice of excess leading to misconduct and disaster. Recently, curiosity has transformed into a virtue of self-expression resulting in success and better performance. In classrooms, educators try to find ways of eliciting curiosity from their students: allowing them to pick their own research topics and books, including pop cu...

Chills are amuscular phenomenon best described as the sensation of coldness created by a rhythmic oscillating tremor of skeletal muscles. In humans, chills are sometimes associated with a positive hedonic process. In the present article, we shall refer to such an event as aesthetic chills. Aesthetic chills appear to be a universal emotional experience (see e.g., McCrae, 2007). In laboratory, th...

Understanding evolution is a necessary component of undergraduate education in biology, and evolution is difficult to explain without studying the heritability of traits. However, in most classes, heritability is presented with only a handful of graphs showing typical morphological traits, for example, beak size in finches and height in humans. The active-inquiry exercise outlined in the follow...

Understanding evolution is a necessary component of undergraduate education in biology, and evolution is difficult to explain without studying the heritability of traits. However, in most classes, heritability is presented with only a handful of graphs showing typical morphological traits, for example, beak size in finches and height in humans. The active-inquiry exercise outlined in the follow...

Research on curiosity has undergone 2 waves of intense activity. The 1st, in the 1960s, focused mainly on curiosity's psychological underpinnings. The 2nd, in the 1970s and 1980s, was characterized by attempts to measure curiosity and assess its dimensionality. This article reviews these contributions with a concentration on the 1st wave. It is argued that theoretical accounts of curiosity prop...

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 correlated positively with I-type curiosity and negativel...

level, early in my career I thought that my efforts would essentially contribute to general knowledge in the field. However, new technologies have led us to exciting efforts that are translational in nature. The development of array recording from populations of cortical neurons has enabled us to develop neural prosthetics that will be able to decode the intents of paralyzed patients so they ca...