Beyond Human Curiosity
A Transdisciplinary View

Project by

Sofia Forss
Early-Career Fellow 2021–2022

Curiosity has been studied mainly using language-based tasks, and therefore existing knowledge about curiosity thus far excludes both infants and non-humans. As part of an interdisciplinary research team, Sofia’s fellowship project at the Collegium reviewed how curiosity has been formalized by philosophers and psychologists, and why ignoring animal cognition prevents behavioral measurements of the traits necessary to explain evolutionary continuity as well as developmental trajectories in human infancy.