collative variables

The properties of a stimulus that make the mind want to look harder — novelty, complexity, uncertainty, and conflict — named by Berlyne as the triggers of curiosity.

Collative variables are what make a puzzle pull and a mismatch kindle: the mind collates (compares) what it expected with what it found, and the gap between them is the curiosity's fuel. Conflict — the mismatch between expectation and reality — is the collative variable a productively wrong label exploits: the perceiver expects what the name points to, finds something else, and the gap drives exploration. The framework predicts that curiosity does not require the perceiver to believe the label is accurate — the gap is created by the mismatch itself, not by the belief, which is why a told-wrong label can still kindle interest when the disclosure frames the mismatch as a puzzle rather than an error.