RTG 2906 Curiosity

Finn Ohmann

I completed my B.Sc. in Psychology in Cologne and my M.Sc. in Psychology in Göttingen. Throughout my studies, I worked as a student research assistant and statistics tutor, supporting data collection, statistical analysis, and teaching in applied statistics and R. I also gained research experience in developmental psychology, psycholinguistics, experimental psychology, and psychophysiology, including behavioural, language-processing, and eye-tracking studies with infants, children, and adults.

My thesis work further developed these interests. In my Bachelor’s thesis, Evaluation of the Questionnaire for Assessing Dimensional Aspects of Attachment Quality in Children and Adolescents, I examined the psychometric evaluation of an attachment questionnaire for children and adolescents. Building on this foundation, my Master’s thesis, Free Play-Based Exploration and Learning, investigates how children explore during naturalistic play, with a particular focus on the roles of looking and touching in learning, exploration, and exploitation.

During my Bachelor's degree, I completed a research internship at the Department of Performance Psychology at the German Sport University Cologne. There, I worked in psychophysiology and performance psychology, focusing on emotional impulse control, cardiac vagal activity, and sympathetic activity. My involvement in this research continued beyond the internship and remains ongoing. It also contributed to a scientific poster presented at the 64th Annual Meeting of the Society for Psychophysiological Research in Prague and a paper that will be submitted in the near future.



I am curious about the active role that children play in their own development. Rather than seeing children only as passive recipients of information, I am interested in how they seek out information, decide what to explore, and use their own actions to structure learning.

This is also what draws me to curiosity as a research topic, since it connects cognitive development, motivation, attention, learning, and real-world behaviour. I am especially interested in how curiosity unfolds in naturalistic contexts, how cognition and behaviour interact, and how curiosity may differ between children.

More broadly, I am interested in curiosity, exploration and exploitation, cognitive development, the relation between curiosity and ADHD, how we can use physiological markers to investigate cognition, computational modelling — and everything else.



  • 64th Annual Meeting of the Society for Psychophysiological Research (SPR), Prague, Czech Republic — scientific poster contribution.
  • Lancaster Conference on Infant and Child Development (LCICD), Lancaster, United Kingdom — upcoming attendance.
  • Scientific poster presented at the 64th Annual Meeting of the Society for Psychophysiological Research (SPR), Prague, Czech Republic.