Precisiones sobre la Relación entre la Curiosidad Científica y la Toma de Decisiones

Scientific curiosity is conceptualized as a psychological state that addresses uncertainty and that has links to people’s cognitive functioning. Since the mid-20th century, it has been shown that curiosity emerges together with lower-order cognitive processes such as perception and attention, and transcends to higher-order cognitive processes such as metacognition and anticipation. In essence, many of the studies in this field integrate decision making as a key component of curiosity. However, the functional and structural reasons that link them both have not yet been delved into. Research in cognitive neuroscience has shown that the functionality of curiosity and decision-making, despite corresponding to rational processes, is also crossed by an emotional component that allows problem situations to be approached from the desire to know one result or another. Additionally, for both cases, the mutual activation of structures related to pleasant sensations and emotional appraisal has been found, along with cold processing structures such as areas of the prefrontal cortex. Thus, scientific curiosity and decision making are emotional/cognitive processes that allow us to understand people’s behavior when they make decisions based on their desire to close the knowledge gaps.