Components of Curiosity: Berlyne Reconsidered

Abstract

Berlyne has found that collative stimuli—stimuli with the attributes of complexity, incongruity, or ambiguity, among others—attract longer visual exploration than their less perplexing counterparts. He has postulated a curiosity motive to account for the finding; this paper suggests an alternative explanation of some of his results. The first of two experiments evaluates whether viewing time allotted to collative stimuli is increased by prior curiosity‐arousal. The second evaluates whether a ‘set to remember’ also increases viewing of collative stimuli. Results indicate (a) that both experimental conditions elevate attention to collative stimuli, and to approximately the same extent; but (b) that curiosity‐arousal particularly elevates attention to incongruous stimuli, whereas, a ‘set to remember’ increases attention to complex stimuli. Control subjects given instructions patterned after Berlyne's seem to exhibit a self‐induced remembering set. This emphasizes the need to separate the effects due to curiosity from those due to a remembering orientation.

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