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PubMed · 1559141

Interestingness.

R W Frick
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Abstract

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.

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AttentionHumansLearningMental RecallMotivationReadingSet, PsychologyJournal ArticleResearch Support, U.S. Gov't, P.H.S.

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R W Frick. 1992. Interestingness.. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2044-8295.1992.tb02427.x

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