ABSTRACT
Behavioral acts known as stimulus-seeking, sen sation-seeking, and exploration are as important for understanding animal and human behavior as they are difficult to define and study. Marler and Hamilton (1966) began their chapter on exploration, aggression, conflict, and play with the following statement: “Animals spend much of their time in motor activity, the function of which is often difficult to identify” (p. 159). Twenty-eight years later Keller, Schneider, and Henderson (1994) wrote as follows regarding exploration: “[W]e have not attempted to arrive at a definition of curiosity and exploratory be havior upon which every contributor to this vol ume would agree. Given the state of the art in research and theory on curiosity and exploratory behavior, we thought to attempt to do so would be counterproductive” (p. 3).
