The ecosystem of discovery

Abstract

Human knowledge is an ever-evolving network born from interconnected systems. Individual minds engage with and interpret our constantly changing environment; whereas scientific disciplines provide a platform for collective knowledge, fostering the exchange of new ideas and adoption of established principles. Nonetheless, the study of knowledge tends to be segmented. In this dissertation, I bridge this gap by investigating the intersection of individual minds and the collective knowledge of scientific communities—which I call the “ecosystem of discovery.” In Chapter 2, I begin by examining the cognitive processes that allow individual minds to make discoveries, namely question asking and curiosity. Our results suggest that identifying gaps in one’s knowledge and posing questions about those gaps stimulates curiosity, promotes the search for answers, and enhances memory recall. In Chapter 3, I switch my attention to the collective knowledge established by scientific communities. I present a large-scale analysis of the structure of scientific concepts, with a focus on core/periphery organization. The findings suggest that prominent and less rigid core/periphery structures create an environment conducive to discovery. In Chapter 4, I consider how individual minds interact with collective or pre-existing knowledge. Our findings reveal that creative contexts lead to more frequent exploration-exploitation trade-offs, resulting in knowledge networks of foraged-for information that exhibit highly clustered information (exploitation) with lower average edge weights likely influenced by the dissimilarity between clusters (exploration). Together, these findings offer insights into the complex, interlinked ecosystem that fuels scientific discovery.