Frustration, exploration, and learning.

Abstract

D. E. Berlyne's principle that uncertainty leads to exploration is extended to situations involving frustrativc nonreward. Both empirical evidence and logical analysis support the frustration-exploration hypothesis, which posits that uncertain frustration leads to exploration, whose primary function is to broaden the scope of response selection. The facilitative effects of frustration-motivated exploration in learning are documented, and their implications for education are discussed. One of Daniel Berlyne's abiding interests was in curiosity and exploration. Perhaps, among his many significant contributions to psychology, his work in this area has made the greatest impact. His 1960 monograph Conflict, Arousal and Curiosity is among the 100 books most cited by social scientists (Garfield, 1978). Few will disagree that it is mainly due to Berlyne's influence that exploration or information seeking has been elevated to the same status as hedonism as one of the primary sources of motivation. In view of the prevalence of information seeking (Berlyne, 1966), a case may be made that it is a more important motivation than the pursuit of hedonic goals. In paying tributes to Berlyne, I cannot help but reminisce on the good old days of being a graduate student at the University of Toronto, when both Daniel Berlyne and Abram Amsel were on the psychology faculty. To be taught by these two eminent psychologists was to be influenced by them in a profound way. Although different in many ways in their approaches to research, both of them demonstrated a remarkable degree of independence of thought in the midst of shifting paradigms and changing fashions in psychological research. While Amsel concentrated his Portions of this paper were presented in a symposium in honour of the late D. E. Berlyne at the Canadian Psychological Association Meeting in Vancouver, July, 1977. The paper was written while the author was a visiting scholar at the University of California, Los Angeles. It was supported by Grant 3A0701 from the National Research Council of Canada, and a Canada Council Leave Fellowship. Requests for reprints should be addressed to P. T. P. Wong, Department of Psychology, Trent University, Peterborough, Ontario, K9J 7B8. research efforts in well defined problem areas, Berlyne's own curiosity led him to explore new frontiers in psychology. One learned from Amsel how to rigorously and thoroughly investigate a phenomenon; one learned from Berlyne how to see old problems in new lights and how to detect connections in seemingly unrelated areas of research. Both of these approaches have influenced my own research career, and these influences have contributed to the present paper which attempts to interface frustration and exploration. In the past ten years, I have done several studies on the problem of persistence and frustration, even though such research no longer attracts the attention it once did. Having carefully observed hundreds of rats in a great variety of frustrating situations, I cannot help but notice the prevalence of exploratory behaviour. For example, in a runway situation, partial reinforcement increases sniffing, exploration of irrelevant holes on the runway walls, and variation of routes leading to the goalbox (Wong 1977a, 1978a). In this article, I will document the existing evidence supporting the frustration-exploration hypothesis. More specifically, I will attempt to demonstrate that (1) uncertain frustration leads to exploration, (2) frustration-motivated exploration primarily consists of response-variation, and (3) this type of exploration plays an important role in instrumental learning. However, before we examine the evidence and arguments in support of the frustration-exploration hypothesis, we should first examine exploration as a concept and past research on this topic.