Colloquium

What is curiosity? Is it an emotion? A behavior? A cognitive process? Curiosity seems to be an abstract concept—like love, perhaps, or justice—far from the realm of those bits of nature that mathematics can possibly address. However, contrary to intuition, it turns out that the leading theories of curiosity are surprisingly amenable to formalization in the mathematics of network science. In this talk, I will unpack some of those theories, and show how they can be formalized in the mathematics of networks. Then, I will describe evidence from human behavior and linguistic corpora and ask which theories that evidence supports. Throughout, I will make a case for the position that individual and collective curiosity are both network building processes, providing a connective counterpoint to the common acquisitional account of curiosity in humans.

Reference: Perry Zurn & Dani S. Bassett. Curious Minds: The Power of Connection. MIT Press, 2022.

Speaker will be on Zoom.

Place:             Math, 501 and Zoom:  https://arizona.zoom.us/j/81337180102 Password:   applied