Curiosity and surprise enhance memory differently in adolescents than in children

Curiosity - broadly defined as the desire to acquire new information – enhances learning and memory in adults. Surprise about information facilitates later memory as well. To date, it is not known how states of curiosity and surprise about information enhance memory in childhood and adolescence. We used a trivia paradigm in which children and adolescents (N = 60, 10–14 years) encoded trivia questions and answers associated with high or low curiosity. States of high pre-answer curiosity enhanced later memory for trivia answers in both children and adolescents. However, higher positive post-answer surprise enhanced memory for trivia answers beyond the effects of curiosity in adolescents, but not in children. These results suggest that curiosity and surprise have positive effects on learning and memory in childhood and adolescence, but might need to be harnessed in differential ways across child development to optimize learning.