Research Atlas Early prototype
Curiosity Research Atlas
A map of the last ten years of research on curiosity: what curiosity is, why we chase it, and what it does for learning, creativity, work and everyday life. Pick a theme, follow the connections and find papers worth reading.
How this was made. I built this as a study aid while exploring curiosity research, and I'm sharing it in case it's useful to you too. It's an AI-developed tool: the papers were found using Perplexity, and the summaries, map and page were created with Claude. I've chosen what to include, but I haven't checked each record against the original source, and AI summaries can get things wrong. Please read the original paper before relying on or citing it.
The collection
Papers
Start with the featured papers: hand-picked entry points, each with a note on why it matters in practice. Everything else is in the index below.
Featured
The index
Glossary
Key terms
Curiosity research has its own vocabulary, and different researchers sometimes use the same word in slightly different ways. These are plain-English working definitions to help you read the papers, not the final word. Where a term has a button, it searches the collection for you.
Kinds of curiosity
- Epistemic curiosity
- Curiosity about knowledge and ideas: wanting to understand how something works, why it happened or what the answer is. Most research on curiosity and learning is about this kind. The term comes from the psychologist Daniel Berlyne.
- Perceptual (sensory) curiosity
- Curiosity sparked by what we see, hear, touch or otherwise sense, especially when it's new, odd or ambiguous. Turning round to find the source of a strange noise is perceptual curiosity at work.
- Diversive curiosity
- A roaming, general appetite for something new or stimulating, often to escape boredom, without a particular question in mind. Think of browsing or channel-hopping.
- Specific curiosity
- Curiosity aimed at one particular missing piece, such as the answer to a riddle, the end of a story or the cause of a problem. It usually fades once the gap is filled.
- Interest-type (I-type) curiosity
- The enjoyable side of curiosity: taking pleasure in learning something new for its own sake, in a relaxed, take-it-or-leave-it way. A distinction developed by Jordan Litman.
- Deprivation-type (D-type) curiosity
- The restless, sometimes uncomfortable "need to know" that builds until a specific gap is closed.
- Trait and state curiosity
- Trait curiosity is how curious someone tends to be in general, a fairly stable part of personality. State curiosity is how curious they feel right now, about a particular thing. Someone can be high in one and low in the other.
- Social (interpersonal) curiosity
- Curiosity about other people: what they think, feel and do. Some measures split it into overt social curiosity (asking and listening) and covert social curiosity (watching or overhearing).
- Morbid curiosity
- Interest in dangerous or disturbing things, such as crime, horror or disasters. Research suggests it may help people learn about threats from a safe distance.
Reading the research
- Meta-analysis
- A study that statistically combines the results of many earlier studies on the same question, to give an overall estimate of an effect. Usually stronger evidence than any single study.
- Systematic and scoping reviews
- Reviews that search for every relevant study using set rules. A systematic review weighs up the findings; a scoping review maps what research exists and where the gaps are.
- Randomised controlled trial
- A study in which people are randomly assigned to try something (such as a curiosity programme) or not, so differences in outcomes can more confidently be put down to the intervention.
- Correlation and association
- Two things tend to go together, for example more curious people reporting more wellbeing. It doesn't show that one causes the other, which is why many summaries here say "associated with".
- Effect size
- How big a difference or relationship is, not just whether it exists. Figures like r or g appear in many summaries; as a rough guide, larger numbers mean stronger effects.
- Preprint
- A paper shared publicly before it has been peer reviewed. Useful for seeing new work early, but its findings may change before publication.
For researchers
Is something missing?
This atlas is a careful first map, not a complete census. If you research curiosity and your work, or a paper you rate, isn't here, I'd love to hear from you. I'm also glad to fix any summary or detail you think could be better.
About and methodology
How this collection is made
- What's included
- Publications from October 2016 to October 2026 with "curiosity" or "curious" in the title: journal articles, reviews, preprints, theses, chapters and commentaries. It's a filtered extract of a larger working database of curiosity research. Alongside these sit papers from the same period that I've added from my own library, including a few wider pieces on creativity, learning and organisations that I find useful.
- How papers were found
- Through 174 structured searches of academic indexes, run as five themed batches, plus 10 wider web searches, run with the AI research tool Perplexity. Results were de-duplicated by DOI and then by title, screened for relevance in two stages, and borderline cases were checked one by one. A final AI-assisted search added important papers by leading curiosity researchers that the title search had missed.
- Summaries
- Each paper has a one or two sentence summary, written by AI (Claude) from its abstract. Where only a title was available, the record says so. Summaries are a guide to what a paper covers; always read the original before citing it.
- Themes and connections
- Every paper sits in one of six themes, based on its main research area. Papers also carry topic tags, and when a paper's tags belong to another theme it counts as a link between the two. Those links are the lines on the map.
- Featured papers
- A small, hand-picked selection, mostly reviews and clearly described studies that make good starting points. Each comes with a short note on why it might matter in practice. Featured doesn't mean "best"; it means "a good place to begin".
- Limits worth knowing
- The title rule misses research about curiosity that uses other words, such as interest, wonder or information seeking. Most records come from index data and haven't been independently checked line by line, and coverage of non-English research is likely to be patchy. Each record shows its verification status.
- Keeping it current
- The collection is updated once a month with newly published papers, and with additions researchers suggest.