From Situational Interest and State Curiosity to Personal Interest: Developmental Pathways and Underlying Mechanisms

Yuling Yan^*

• University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

Personal interest, an enduring inclination toward specific topics or domains, supports sustained engagement, deep learning, and positive affect. However, how transient motivational states such as situational interest and state curiosity develop into stable personal interest remains unclear. This review begins with a conceptual analysis of interest and curiosity, focusing on the similarities and differences between situational interest and state curiosity. Building on this foundation, it integrates perspectives from educational psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and motivational science to organize two developmental pathways to personal interest. The first begins with situational interest and progresses through triggered and maintained situational interest to emerging and well-developed personal interest. The second begins with state curiosity and advances through curiosity triggering, evaluation of information value and perceived competence, information seeking and iterative satisfaction, and finally well-developed personal interest. Across both pathways, reward processing functions as a core mechanism, driven by the intrinsic reward of knowledge acquisition and the motivational effects of autonomy and self-relevance. This framework offers an integrated account of how fleeting motivational states can be transformed into enduring personal interest.