Epistemic Curiosity, Conceptual Ambiguity and Cognitive Conflict: Do these Implicate Students Exploratory Behavior

Abstract

Background: Contemporary demands in the labour market continue to be more scientifictechnological. Onus is on institutions of higher learning to develop in students’ flexibility of thinking, as well as an inquiring and inquisitive mindset, that would stimulate in them the culture for curiosity and scientific research. Consequently, this paper establishes a link of cognitive/educational psychology research to epistemic curiosity and human exploratory behavior in postgraduate students attending educational psychology classes, to assess how epistemic curiosity implicates their inquiry and affects critical thinking for classroom practice. Method: A total of two hundred (200) random sampling size of students’ in a university, located in the middle belt of Ghana, aged between 24-30 years, participated in this study. They were tested to assess the discrepancy between their feel-of-knowing on three variables: general fluid reasoning, memory test recognition and curiosity-trait questionnaire. Results: Participants with high intensity level to knowledge demonstrated lower knowledge gap, compared to those with low-level of intensity. Similarly, the lower the knowledge gap between curiosity and cognition, the higher the arousal indicating that the ‘I know’ experienced acute stimulation relative to the ‘I don’t know’ participants. In the experiments performed, scores of the ‘I know’ group correlated more positively with epistemic curiosity, feelings of
knowing and exploratory behavior than the ‘I don’t know’ individuals. Conclusion: Human cognitive architecture seems to be structured to avoid cognitive ambiguity. Interest and deprivation-type curiosity in humans appears to be the leading predicting factor
inducing humans to search for answers to bridge the gap between cognition and cognitive dissonance, triggering exploratory behavior to find answers.