The claim that curiosity fades as people get older is one of those things that sounds too obvious to check. A 2025 paper in PLOS ONE checked it, and the answer came back split in a way that changes what the word is describing.
Mary Whatley and colleagues at UCLA, working with Kou Murayama and Michiko Sakaki, surveyed 1,218 adults aged 20 to 84. They measured curiosity two ways. The first was a questionnaire about general appetite for new information, the kind of thing a person reports about themselves in the abstract. The second was concrete: participants read trivia questions, one at a time, and rated how much they wanted to know each answer.
The two measures moved in opposite directions. Older adults scored lower on the general questionnaire and higher on the trivia task. The authors put it plainly: older adults show a tendency to avoid new information in general, but once they are exposed to concrete material, they are more engaged with it, not less.
This is one study, not settled consensus. It is also one we think parents will find useful, because it describes something that happens at the other end of childhood too.
What the study actually measured
We are parents and writers, not developmental researchers, so it is worth being precise about what this paper can carry.
It is cross-sectional, meaning it compared different people of different ages at one moment rather than following the same people as they aged. That distinction matters. It shows differences between age groups, not curiosity changing inside a person over time. The sample was recruited online in the United States, which is not the same as a representative population. And the effects, while statistically solid at that sample size, are small. The correlations sit around .16 to .18, which is a real signal and not a large one.
The state measure was also trivia, and only trivia. Wanting to know the answer to a trivia question is one flavor of curiosity. It is not obviously the same as wanting to know how a hinge works, or why the paint went brown, or what happens if you add more salt.
The authors flag all of this themselves. What survives the caveats is still interesting: how curious someone says they are and how curious they turn out to be when handed something specific are not the same measurement, and they can point in opposite directions in the same person.
The same split shows up in classrooms
Susan Engel and her students at Williams College spent three months observing kindergarten and fifth-grade classrooms, counting episodes of curiosity: questions asked, sustained looking, handling an object to find something out. She reported the results in the Harvard Educational Review in 2011.
In kindergarten they counted an average of 2.36 episodes per two hours. In fifth grade, 0.48.
The tempting reading is that children lose curiosity somewhere around age eight. The more careful reading, and the one Engel herself argues for, is that the classrooms changed. Older students had fewer moments in which asking was the thing to do. The count is a measure of the room as much as the child.
Put next to the UCLA finding, a pattern shows up at both ends. Adults who describe themselves as no longer curious lean in when something concrete arrives. Children who look uncurious in a fifth-grade classroom are being counted in a setting that has stopped putting questions in front of them. In neither case is the appetite the thing that changed first.
What curiosity does and does not predict
The research on curiosity and learning is stronger than a single paper, which is worth saying because most articles on this topic rest on one study and imply a consensus.
Prachi Shah and colleagues at the University of Michigan analyzed data on roughly 6,200 children in the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Birth Cohort, and published the results in Pediatric Research in 2018. Greater curiosity was associated with higher reading and math achievement at kindergarten. The association was stronger for children in lower-income households, which the authors suggest makes curiosity worth attention as something schools might support rather than assume.
Separately, Sophie von Stumm, Benedikt Hell and Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic pooled decades of studies in Perspectives on Psychological Science in 2011 and found that intellectual curiosity and effort together predicted academic performance about as well as measured intelligence did.
Here is where we would ask you to slow down, because this is the point the internet usually gets wrong. These are associations in large groups of children. They are not a mechanism you can install in one child on a Tuesday afternoon. Nothing in this literature says that a specific activity produces a specific gain, and nothing in it justifies treating a rainy-afternoon project as an intervention. Curious children tend to do better on average. That is a fact about populations, and it is a poor reason to set up an art table.
The better reason is that the child wants to know what happens when the blue goes into the yellow.
The retirement end of it
The lifespan half of this deserves more than a closing line, partly because a lot of the adults in a child’s life are on that end of it.
The most useful evidence we have found here is the Synapse Project, run by Denise Park and colleagues at the University of Texas at Dallas and published in Psychological Science in 2014. Adults aged 60 and over were assigned to learn something genuinely new and demanding, either quilting or digital photography, or to one of two comparison groups: a social group that met regularly, and a group doing activities that used knowledge they already had. Over three months, only the groups learning a new skill showed improvement in episodic memory.
The design is what makes it worth citing. People were assigned to conditions rather than choosing them, which rules out the obvious objection that curious people simply sign up for more classes. It remains one trial with a modest sample, and it measured memory over months rather than anything over years.
A 2018 review by Michiko Sakaki, Ayano Yagi and Kou Murayama in Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews gathered the wider picture: curiosity tends to decline with age, and adults who hold onto it tend to report better emotional wellbeing and show slower decline in some measures. Those are associations drawn from observational work, and the review says so. It is not evidence that staying curious prevents anything.
The detail we keep returning to is the one the UCLA authors found by accident, in an analysis they describe as exploratory and in need of replication. On the in-the-moment measure, it was middle-aged adults who scored lowest. Not the oldest. The people in the thick of work and small children were the least likely to want to know the answer.
Which is a strange and slightly consoling thing to learn while cleaning up a craft table.
What we take from it
If curiosity behaves less like a personality trait and more like a response to what is actually in front of someone, then the practical move is not to build a curious child. It is to keep putting specific things where they can be picked up.
This is what we already do at the table without calling it that. A jar of buttons and no instructions. A magnifying glass left near a window. Half a project abandoned in plain view. None of it works every time, and a good deal of it gets ignored for weeks and then used hard for a fortnight.
It also suggests the invitation is worth extending to whoever else is in the house. A grandparent who says they are past learning new things is describing the general questionnaire, not the trivia task. In our experience the same person will sit down for an hour with a jar of buttons if a five-year-old hands it to them and asks what the small brass one is for.
What we have not seen is any evidence that this needs to be organized, or scheduled, or turned into something with a name. The materials sitting out where a child can reach them do most of the work, and the adults who claim to have run out of questions turn out to have run out of things put in front of them.