Intrinsic motivations and open-ended development in animals, humans, and robots: an overview.

Gianluca Baldassarre,Andrew Barto,Richard M. Ryan,Peter Redgrave,Tom Stafford,Marco Mirolli

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00985

Abstract

Intrinsic motivations and open-ended development in animals, humans, and robots: an overview.

Highlights

This editorial article introduces the Frontiers Research Topic and Electronic Book on Intrinsic Motivations (IMs), which involved the publication of 24 articles with the journals Frontiers in Psychology – Cognitive Science and Frontiers in Neurorobotics
INTRINSIC MOTIVATIONS AND ATTENTION The computational work of Lonini et al (2013) builds on a previous binocular system in which an IM learning signal is generated on the basis of the capacity of the system to reconstruct images encoded with sparse-coding features
Mather (2013) briefly reviews research related to the familiarity-to-novelty attention shift observed in babies, and, on this basis, highlights the challenges that this phenomenon poses to theories on IMs

Summary

INTRODUCTION

This editorial article introduces the Frontiers Research Topic and Electronic Book (eBook) on Intrinsic Motivations (IMs), which involved the publication of 24 articles with the journals Frontiers in Psychology – Cognitive Science and Frontiers in Neurorobotics. Novelty-based IMs are elicited by the experience of stimuli that are not in the agent’s memory (e.g., novel objects, or novel object-object or object-context combinations); prediction-based IMs are related to events that surprise the agent by violating its explicit predictions These distinctions have been formalized in the computational models proposed in the literature. Recent neuroscientific investigations are revealing brain mechanisms that possibly underlie the IM systems investigated in the behavioral and computational literature Such investigations are carried out under agendas different from the one on IMs, e.g., in relation to dopamine, memory, motor learning, goal-directed behavior, and conflict monitoring, so comprehensive views are still missing. Frontiers in Psychology | Cognitive Science in the neuroscientific literature and concerning the acquisition of non-trivial motor actions

INTRINSIC MOTIVATIONS AND ATTENTION

INTRINSIC MOTIVATIONS AND OPEN-ENDED DEVELOPMENT OF MOTOR SKILLS

INTRINSIC MOTIVATIONS AND SOCIAL PHENOMENA

CONCLUDING REMARKS