Children's Reactions to Novelty: An Experimental Study of "Curiosity Motivation"

Assessment of spatial egocentrism through expectancy violation

“…Casual observation suggests that a possible reason it was not sensitive in this stud y is that, while some children seemed to take Ion ger looks in the trick condition, others looked less long as an effect of being eager to change to another position of regard, as if they suspected that something was "am iss" and wished to check their suspicions. Thus, while the present data are divergent from the results obtained by Smock & Holt (1962), it may be that increased visual contact with conceptually conflictual displays occurs only if the S believes that his existing situation (trial) provides his only opportunity to resolve the confliet.…”

“…In addition, the tendency to increase perceptual. contact with the discrepant stimulus was employed as a dependent variable due to previous successful use of this variable with older children (Smock & Holt, 1962). SUBJEeTS Two groups of 24 Ss were drawn from the Merrill-Palmer Institute Nursery Schoo!.…”

Amount of stimulus exploration and preference as differential functions of stimulus complexity

“…Fourteen slides defining a sevenpoint scale of complexity were selected from each set and given to college students to obtain measures of (a) The variable of stimulus complexity has come in for a good deal of attention in recent research and theorizing on the arousal of behavior (Berlyne, 1960;Dember & Earl, 1957;Munsinger & Kessen, 1964;Vitz, 1966a, b;Walker, 1964), Central to much of this work is the concept of an optimal level of stimulation (Fiske & Maddi, 1961;Leuba, 1955) according to which positive affect is produced by stimuli representing a certain value on the scale of complexity, determined by the individual's normal level of stimulation, or more particularly, by some deviation from this adaptation level (e.g., Terwilliger, 1963). This concept of an optimal level of stimulation clearly dictates a research design embodying systematic variation of stimuli along the continuum of complexity, This feature is conspicuously absent in the earlier work of Berlyne investigating the effects of complexity, as in that of others (e.g., Smock & Holt, 1962) directly inspired by Berlyne's, in which stimuli were typically dichotomized into high vs low complexity, or at best into trichotomous categories. More recently, however, a number of researchers (Munsinger & Kessen, 1964;Vitz, 1966a, b) have constructed sets of stimuli varying over an extended range of the complexity dimension, and scaled on an a priori basis, by defining this variable in information-theory terms and constructing randomly generated stimuli of specifiable amounts of information content.…”

Is Science Learning Magic?

“…For the purpose of the present argument, children are armed with the tools of scientific thought: curiosity (Smock & Holt, 1962), the ability to detect patterns in the environment (Saffran, Aslin, & Newport, 1996), persistence (Lufi & Cohen, 1987), and rudimentary hypothesis-testing skills (Gopnik, Meltzoff, & Kuhl, 1999). Unfortunately, they are unaware that they possess these tools, unaware that they are using them, and unable to devote time and effort strategically to refine them.…”