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

Casual observation of the activities of children and adults is sufficient to establish the power of novel features of the environment to evoke and direct behavior. Unusual or unfamiliar objects have considerable potency for attracting attention, while monotony and routine appear to arouse, in many individuals, an active striving to encounter new aspects of their environment. The apparent independence of these behavior tendencies from primary needs and social influences have led a number of psychological theorists to consider an explanation of curiosity and exploratory behavior essential to our understanding of human motivational processes. Since MacDougall's instinct theory, personality theorists have introduced such concepts as effort after meaning (3), need cognition (9), and competence motivation (28) to account for individual variation in the tendency to seek and maintain contact with environmental and/or psychological novelty. More recently the research of Harlow (13) and others (cf. review by Glanzer I2) based on the concept of exteroceptively elicited drives has produced extensive data indicating that rats, raccoons, and monkeys, as well as men, under certain conditions tend to behave so as to maximize knowledge of an unfamiliar or novel environment. However, the environmental and psychological conditions that facilitate the development and maintenance of curiosity motivation during the various stages of ontogenetic development have received little attention. The investigation presented below is a preliminary step designed to provide information for the systematic study of curiosity motivation during early stages of childhood. Curiosity motivation is generally inferred from instrumental actions that function to increase the organism's contact with new or different environmental objects. These actions may be such as to: (a) increase the level or quantity of sensory input; (b) increase the perceptual clarity, or number,