Interestingness.
What makes a statement interesting? In Expts 1 and 2, merely increasing the amount of background knowledge on a topic did not always increase the interest for statements on that topic. However, background knowledge that combined with a statement to create an interesting implicit proposition did increase interest. In Expt 3, the likelihood of an event's occurrence was not a good predictor of its interestingness, whereas there was a good correspondence between interest and changes in the subjects' beliefs. These findings suggest that interest is not a simple function of either unexpectedness or amount of background knowledge. The results are consistent with the hypothesis that statements changing a person's beliefs or confidence in beliefs are interesting.
Frick
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Department of Psychology, SUNY, Stony Brook 11794-2500.
D001288:Attention; D006801:Humans; D007858:Learning; D011939:Mental Recall; D009042:Motivation; D011932:Reading; D012718:Set, Psychology