Abstract
The concepts of attention and intrinsic motivations are of great interest within adaptive robotic systems, and can be exploited in order to guide, activate, and coordinate multiple concurrent behaviors. Attention allocation strategies represent key capabilities of human beings, which are strictly connected with action selection and execution mechanisms, while intrinsic motivations directly affect the allocation of attentional resources. In this paper we propose a model of Reinforcement Learning (RL), where both these capabilities are involved. RL is deployed to learn how to allocate attentional resources in a behavior-based robotic system, while action selection is obtained as a side effect of the resulting motivated attentional behaviors. Moreover, the influence of intrinsic motivations in attention orientation is obtained by introducing rewards associated with curiosity drives. In this way, the learning process is affected not only by goal-specific rewards, but also by intrinsic motivations.
Highlights
Attention and intrinsic motivations play a crucial role in cognitive control (Posner et al, 1980) and are of great interest in cognitive robotics
This could be due to the fact that the curiosity, initially, leads the system to prefer the exploration of novel spaces rather than the goal-directed ones
In both the cases we observe that the learning converges after at most 450 episodes, in the case of the robot endowed with curiosity an earlier convergence is obtained
Summary
Attention and intrinsic motivations play a crucial role in cognitive control (Posner et al, 1980) and are of great interest in cognitive robotics. Attentional mechanisms and motivational drives are strictly involved in the process of guiding and orchestrating multiple concurrent behaviors. Attentional mechanisms, beyond their role in perception orientation, are considered as key mechanisms in action selection and coordination (Posner et al, 1980; Norman and Shallice, 1986). The curiosity drive can attract the attentional focus toward novel stimuli and, can elicit the execution of actions which are not directly related to the current behavior or goal. Albeit there is not a clear consensus on how intrinsic motivations differ from the extrinsic ones (Baldassarre, 2011), their role in pushing human/animal beings to spontaneously explore their environment (Baldassarre and Mirolli, 2013) and to execute this activity only for their inherent satisfaction (Ryan and Deci, 2000), rather than for satisfying some basic needs such as hunger or thirst (White, 1959; Berlyne, 1960), is widely accepted
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