You can reach me at either of the following addresses.

For academic and research matters:

    mpascale [AT] bu [DOT] edu

For all other personal and professional matters:

    mpascale [AT] psyc [DOT] dev

My public key fingerprint is: 

5335 C45A 1E46 69F9 DA6F  B46B E3A2 9AC4 FC3B 1D4F

You may download it directly from static.psyc.dev/pubkey. 

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I have extended this key's validity through December, 2029.

Michael P. Pascale

Research in Computational Cognitive Sciences, Curiosity, Exploration

Email GitHub BlueSky Google Scholar ORCID OpenPGP

Hello! I am a doctoral student in the Cognition and Decision Lab at Boston University.

My research is concerned with human information behavior, which I approach from the perspective of computational cognitive neuroscience. Of particular interest to me are those information seeking and exploratory behaviors which appear to be curiosity-driven.

Curiosity is a state of being with deep cultural significance1, attended to by many generations of philosophers and several generations of psychologists2 34. Only recently is it possible to integrate these efforts with cognitive neuroscience5 6, wherein the past fourty years1 of work has yielded insight into the neural underpinnings of motivation and decision-making. The study of curiosity brings up many questions evocative of neuroepistemology7 and neuroaesthetics.

  • How does our experience of curiosity, and the conditions under which we exhibit it, improve or impair our ability to find truth?
  • Why is it that particular information content or presentation promotes curious states more or less than others?
  • To what extent do nonhuman animals exhibit exploratory behavior that resembles human curiosity-driven behavior?

On a broader scale, I am particularly interested how these aspects of individual psychology impact social epistemology and the acquisition of knowledge as a human social endeavor.

I also am an avid supporter of the open source movement, contributing to free texts and to software tools in the social sciences. Generally I welcome solicitations for tutoring or free software work.

References

1.
Papastephanou, M. ed. (2019). Toward New Philosophical Explorations of the Epistemic Desire to Know: Just Curious about Curiosity (Cambridge Scholars Publishing).
2.
James, W. (1918). The principles of psychology (Henry Holt and Company via Project Gutenberg).
3.
Berlyne, D.E. (1954). A theory of human curiosity. British Journal of Psychology 45, 180–191.
4.
Loewenstein, G. (1994). The psychology of curiosity: A review and reinterpretation. Psychological Bulletin 116, 75–98. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.116.1.75.
5.
Kidd, C., and Hayden, B.Y. (2015). The Psychology and Neuroscience of Curiosity. Neuron 88, 449–460. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2015.09.010.
6.
Cervera, R.L., Wang, M.Z., and Hayden, B.Y. (2020). Systems neuroscience of curiosity. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences 35, 48–55. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cobeha.2020.06.011.
7.
Churchland, P.S. (2004). How Do Neurons Know? Daedalus 133, 42–50.

Footnotes

  1. Approximating the field’s beginning as marked in 1989 with the first issue of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.↩︎