Ecological Aspects of Neophobia and neophilia in birds

Abstract

Nearly fifty years ago D. F. Berlyne (1950) wrote Psychology has so far had surprisingly little to say about stimuli which influence behavior simply because they are new. Stimuli which owe their potency to the fact that they are not new ... have given rise to the vast corpus of observations and generalization that go to make up learning theory. But the everyday activity of both men and animals seem [sic] to attest to the importance of novelty as well as familiarity in features of the environment.