An Integrative Appraisal Model of Epistemic Curiosity

Erdemli, Audrin, and Sander (Affective Science, 2025) propose the Integrative Appraisal Model of Epistemic Curiosity (IAMEC), a unified framework that reconciles three rival accounts of why humans seek knowledge: the information-gap account (Loewenstein), the emotion account (Silvia, appraisal theory), and the reward-anticipation account (Murayama, Gruber & Ranganath). The paper's motivating puzzle is that not every knowledge gap elicits curiosity — "if the detection of a knowledge gap was enough to elicit a desire to fill the gap, encyclopedias would be addictive."

The model's core move is to route knowledge gaps through Scherer's Component Process Model of appraisal. A gap triggers curiosity only when it is appraised as high in relevance, valence, novelty, and coping potential. When curiosity fires, it confers reward value on the epistemic object, triggers a dopaminergic reward-anticipation process ("wanting knowledge"), and motivates knowledge-seeking. Once the knowledge is obtained and consumed ("liking"), the felt pleasure is compared against expectation as an affective prediction error, which updates future knowledge-seeking — closing the loop into sustained learning and the development of interests.

The key asymmetry: if relevance is appraised high but coping potential low, the same gap produces anxiety and information-avoidance instead. The paper's most concrete illustration is the spouse-infidelity scenario — one might seek the knowledge if it enables repair, but avoid it if divorce is economically impossible. The authors offer explicit falsification conditions (curiosity elicited by low-relevance/low-coping gaps; avoidance following positive affective prediction errors) and sketch how computational accounts (active inference, learning progress) could extend the model.