Adolescents’ curiosity facilitates recall of tobacco-related health information

Curiosity about cigarette smoking is a risk-factor for smoking initiation. Here we test the extent to which curiosity may be leveraged in health communications designed to prevent smoking initiation during adolescence by testing whether adolescent never-smokers exhibit curiosity about tobacco-related health information and whether this curiosity can facilitate recall of this information. Participants (n=294 never-smoking adolescents, ages 14-16 years; n=499 never-smoking adults, ages 25-27 years) performed a trivia guessing task wherein they guessed the answers to general trivia and smoking-related trivia questions. A subset of participants (n=153 adolescents; n=151 adults) completed a surprise trivia memory task one week later and answered the previously viewed questions. Results indicate that adolescents are no less curious about tobacco-related trivia than they are about general trivia and that curiosity about the answers to tobacco-related-trivia is associated with more accurate recall of tobacco-related trivia answers one week later. Findings suggest that engendering states of curiosity for tobacco-related information may facilitate retention of that information in never-smoking adolescents.