Title: Curious Minds Wonder Alike: Studying Multimodal Behavioral Dynamics to Design Social Scaffolding of Curiosity,
Abstract: Curiosity is the strong desire to learn or know more about something or
someone. Since learning is often a social endeavor, social dynamics in
collaborative learning may inevitably influence curiosity. There is a scarcity
of research, however, focusing on how curiosity can be evoked in group learning
contexts. Inspired by a recently proposed theoretical framework that
articulates an integrated socio-cognitive infrastructure of curiosity, in this
work, we use data-driven approaches to identify fine-grained social scaffolding
of curiosity in child-child interaction, and propose how they can be used to
elicit and maintain curiosity in technology-enhanced learning environments. For
example, we discovered sequential patterns of multimodal behaviors across group
members and we describe those that maximize an individual's utility, or
likelihood, of demonstrating curiosity during open-ended problem-solving in
group work. We also discovered, and describe here, behaviors that directly or
in a mediated manner cause curiosity related conversational behaviors in the
interaction, with twice as many interpersonal causal influences compared to
intrapersonal ones. We explain how these findings form a solid foundation for
developing curiosity-increasing learning technologies or even assisting a human
coach to induce curiosity among learners.