The tension between exploitation of the best options and exploration of alternatives is a ubiquitous problem that all organisms face. To examine this trade-off across species, pigeons and people were trained on an eight-armed bandit task in which the options were rewarded on a variable interval (VI) schedule. At regular intervals, each option's VI changed, thus encouraging dynamic increases in exploration in response to these anticipated changes. Both species showed sensitivity to the payoffs that was often well modeled by Luce's (1963) decision rule. For pigeons, exploration of alternative options was driven by experienced changes in the payoff schedules, not the beginning of a new session, even though each session signaled a new schedule. In contrast, people quickly learned to explore in response to signaled changes in the payoffs.

The production of variability in behavior has been linked to creativity (Campbell, 1960), so it seemed possible that manipulating stimulus variability would influence judgments of creativity. The present set of experiments examined people's judgments of the creativity of colored arrays of circles and squares and whether these judgments are a function of the variability of the arrays. Experiment 1 determined that people's judgment of the variability of 4´4 arrays of colored circles was a direct function of a new algorithm for generating array variability, and Experiment 2 revealed a strong relationship between this judged variability and the judged creativity of those same arrays. Experiment 3 extended this finding to a new type of array, and Experiment 4 replicated this finding using the explicit judgment of creativity on a Likert scale rather than the pairwise choice procedure of Experiments 1 through 3. The results are placed within the context of a preferred level of variability, the role of novelty, and the systematic study of the creative product. 89

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