Stanislas Dehaene

Chaire Psychologie cognitive expérimentale

Année 2025-2026

Collège de France

Colloque : Seeing the Mind, Educating the Brain

Theme: Infancy, Development, and Education

Developmental Origins of Human Curiosity

Colloque - Lisa Feigenson : Developmental Origins of Human Curiosity

Lisa Feigenson

Résumé

Curiosity underpins the greatest of human achievements, from exploring the reaches of our solar system to discovering the structure of our own minds.  Where does this drive come from?  Here I suggest that far from being reliant on language and sophisticated metacognitive skills, curiosity is present from our earliest days.  In support of this claim, I discuss work showing that preverbal infants not only experience curiosity but harness it: when babies' predictions fail to accord with their observations, they look longer, learn more, and produce exploratory behaviors.  Critically, their exploration is guided by a desire to explain—long before they have the words to describe what they see, babies seek to understand why things happen as they do. In this sense, the curiosity that emerges in infancy lays the foundation for a lifetime of discovery.