http://worldcat.org/entity/work/id/1332899

Conflict, arousal and curiosity

"The topics that are to be treated in this book were unduly neglected by psychology for many years but are now beginning to come to the fore. My own researches into attention and exploratory behavior began in 1947, and at about the same time several other psychologists became independently impressed with the importance of these matters and started to study them experimentally. It is interesting that those were also the years when information theory was making its appearance and when the reticular formation of the brain stem was first attracting the notice of neurophysiologists. During the last ten years, the tempo of research into exploratory behavior and related phenomena has been steadily quickening. The book is prompted by the feeling that it is now time to pause and take stock: to review relevant data contributed by several different specialties, to consider what conclusions, whether firm or tentative, are justified at the present juncture, and to clarify what remains to be done. The primary aim of the book is, in fact, to raise problems. The book is intended as a contribution to behavior theory, i.e., to psychology conceived as a branch of science with the circumscribed objective of explaining and predicting behavior. But interest in attention and exploratory behavior and in other topics indissociably bound up with them, such as art, humor and thinking, has by no means been confined to professional psychologists. The book has two features that would have surprised me when I first set out to plan it. One is that it ends up sketching a highly modified form of drive-reduction theory. Drive-reduction theory has appeared more and more to be full of shortcomings, even for the phenomena that it was originally designed to handle. The second surprising feature is the prominence of neurophysiology." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved).

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