Uncertainty and Novelty as Collative Motivation in Children

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Abstract
Novelty and uncertainty, distinguished by differences in the temporal distribution of variation in experience, were manipulated as independent factors to determine their relative incentive value for children. Forty first-and fourth-grade boys and girls were given 24 binary-choice preference tests which placed a moderately valued, constant incentive object into competition with a small opaque (uncertainty) or transparent (no uncertainty) package containing a relatively familiar or novel reward. Results showed that uncertainty, conceptualized as conflict within a set of expectations for the future, generated far greater collative arousal than novelty, conceptualized as conflict with respect to past experience. Novelty's collative effects were demonstrated in the choices of the older children and the girls, but the first-graders and the boys failed to differentiate between the familiar and novel alternatives. Attenuation of novelty-familiarity effects was attributed to contrast between the uncertainty and novelty factors. A theoretical collative hierarchy based on information-processing effort, viewed as a joint function of the temporal distribution of variation in experience and the complexity of required processes, was proposed to account for increasing preference for variety, novelty, and uncertainty, respectively, obtained in the present and previous research.