Relationships of curiosity to perceptual and verbal fluency in young children.

The relations of curiosity measured separately by teachers' rating and a revised object-curiosity task to verbal fluency and originality, measured by a work fluency test, and to perceptual fluency, obtained from the "Visual Closure" test of the Illinois Test of Psycholinguistic Abilities, were examined in 60 5- to 6-year-old boys. Although teachers' ratings of curiosity were contaminated by MA, they were significantly related to fluency in verbal recall and less strongly to fluency in visual exploration and verbal originality even when wht effect of MA was held constant. Object curiosity, which was negatively correlated with MA, showed at best negligible covariation with these three measures.