Fig. 1: Overview of experimental procedure.

A Experiment flow chart outlines the three sessions in the experiment. The first session, Familiarisation, comprises three trials allowing participants to become accustomed to the movement controls and the general experiment procedure. The second session, Exploration, involves 16 trials divided into four blocks, with short rest intervals permitted between blocks. In the final session, the Memory Test, participants are tasked with drawing the layouts of the rooms that they visited during the Exploration session. Note that the sketch map test only took place in Experiment 2. B Sample trial in the Exploration session. This depicts a representative trial from the Exploration session. Participants start at a pier, where they can see the type of room they will visit (e.g., Lounge). Their initial task is to rate their level of curiosity about the room on a Likert scale ranging from 1 (“not curious at all”) to 10 (“very much curious”). They then proceed along a pathway to the room, encountering six objects en route (e.g., kettle and bandshell). Upon entering the room, they are free to explore. When they choose to exit, their final task is to rate the interestingness of the room using a similar Likert scale, from 1 (“not interesting at all”) to 10 (“very much interesting”).