Naomi Wentworth

Event-specific expectations of 2- and 3-month-old infants

The Visual Expectation Paradigm (Haith, Hazan, & Goodman, 1988) was modibed to assess the role that picture content plays in the spatiotemporal expectations of 2- and 3-month-old infants. Infants watched pictures of 700-ms duration that appeared in left-right alternation with a 1,000-ms interstimulus interval. The same picture occurred repeatedly on one side, in alternation with an unpredictable picture on the other side. Across 3 studies, the unchanging picture, rather than engendering habituation, produced higher levels of anticipation and speeded reactions

A Paired Comparisons Scale of Children's Preferences for Monetary and Material Rewards Used in Investigations of Incentive Effects

Summary The method of paired comparisons was used to determine 40 first-, third-, and fifth-grade childrens preferences for 12 objects frequently employed as rewards in developmental studies. Significant coefficients of agreement demonstrated stability in the preference order of the 12 objects across the three grades, despite minor fluctuations in preferences for some items. Increases in both intraindividual consistency and interindividual ageement were obtained as a function of developmental level. Despite the introduction of monetary incentives to replace edible rewards employed in a study a decade earlier, the eight rewards common to both scales approximated rank order identity; consistency and agreement data, and developmental trends were highly similar in both studies. Differentiation of preferences increased with age. Full appreciation of the quantitative relationship between the dime and nickel developed between first and third grade, and the coins increased in salience relative to the other rewar...

Uncertainty and Novelty as Collative Motivation in Children

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. Noveltys 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 uncertain...

Is Variety the Better Part of Novelty

Summary 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 childrens 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 noveltys full effects are produced.