Title |
Development of goal-directed action selection guided by intrinsic motivations: an experiment with children
|
---|---|
Published in |
Experimental Brain Research, April 2014
|
DOI | 10.1007/s00221-014-3907-z |
Pubmed ID | |
Authors |
Fabrizio Taffoni, Eleonora Tamilia, Valentina Focaroli, Domenico Formica, Luca Ricci, Giovanni Di Pino, Gianluca Baldassarre, Marco Mirolli, Eugenio Guglielmelli, Flavio Keller |
Abstract |
Action selection is extremely important, particularly when the accomplishment of competitive tasks may require access to limited motor resources. The spontaneous exploration of the world plays a fundamental role in the development of this capacity, providing subjects with an increasingly diverse set of opportunities to acquire, practice and refine the understanding of action-outcome connection. The computational modeling literature proposed a number of specific mechanisms for autonomous agents to discover and target interesting outcomes: intrinsic motivations hold a central importance among those mechanisms. Unfortunately, the study of the acquisition of action-outcome relation was mostly carried out with experiments involving extrinsic tasks, either based on rewards or on predefined task goals. This work presents a new experimental paradigm to study the effect of intrinsic motivation on action-outcome relation learning and action selection during free exploration of the world. Three- and four-year-old children were observed during the free exploration of a new toy: half of them were allowed to develop the knowledge concerning its functioning; the other half were not allowed to learn anything. The knowledge acquired during the free exploration of the toy was subsequently assessed and compared. |
Mendeley readers
Geographical breakdown
Country | Count | As % |
---|---|---|
United Kingdom | 1 | 1% |
Ireland | 1 | 1% |
Belgium | 1 | 1% |
Canada | 1 | 1% |
Unknown | 65 | 94% |
Demographic breakdown
Readers by professional status | Count | As % |
---|---|---|
Student > Ph. D. Student | 13 | 19% |
Student > Bachelor | 11 | 16% |
Student > Master | 11 | 16% |
Student > Doctoral Student | 6 | 9% |
Researcher | 5 | 7% |
Other | 10 | 14% |
Unknown | 13 | 19% |
Readers by discipline | Count | As % |
---|---|---|
Psychology | 21 | 30% |
Neuroscience | 6 | 9% |
Social Sciences | 4 | 6% |
Engineering | 4 | 6% |
Agricultural and Biological Sciences | 3 | 4% |
Other | 14 | 20% |
Unknown | 17 | 25% |