Is Variety the Better Part of Novelty?

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
An experimental task was constructed to evaluate novelty effects produced by an underlying variety component and by unexpectedness. Ten fifth-grade children were given a set of two-choice preference tests designed to separate the effects of variety from those of novelty in determining children's material reward choices. Results showed that variety, defined contemporaneously, and novelty, defined sequentially, contributed independent collative variance. Variation in experience, distributed temporally as novelty, was preferred to concurrent variation, or variety. The findings suggest that simple variation in experience contributes motivational variance, but it is only when this variation is distributed over time, creating unexpectedness, that novelty's full effects are produced.