Analyzing and Modeling User Curiosity in Online Content Consumption: A LastFM Case Study

Curiosity is a natural trait of human behavior. When we take into account the time we spend consuming content online, it is expected that at least a fraction of that time was driven by curious behavior. Aiming at understanding how curiosity drives online information consumption, we here propose a model that captures user curiosity relying on several stimulus metrics. Our model relies on the well-established Wundt's curve from psychology and is based on metrics capturing Novelty, Complexity and Uncertainty as key stimuli driving one's curiosity. As a case study, we apply our model on a dataset of online music consumption from LastFM. We found that there are four main types of user behaviors in terms of how the curiosity stimulus metrics drive the user accesses to online music. These are characterized based on the diversity in the songs, artists and musical genres accessed.