Intrinsically Motivated Learning Systems: An Overview
This chapter introduces the field of intrinsically motivated learning systems and illustrates the content, objectives, and organisation of the book. The chapter first expands the concept of intrinsic motivations, then introduces a taxonomy of three classe
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Abstract This chapter introduces the field of intrinsically motivated learning systems and illustrates the content, objectives, and organisation of the book. The chapter first expands the concept of intrinsic motivations, then introduces a taxonomy of three classes of intrinsic-motivation mechanisms (based on predictors, on novelty detection, and on competence), and finally introduces and reviews the various contributions of the book. The contributions are organised into six parts. The contributions of the first part provide general overviews on the concept of intrinsic motivations, the possible mechanisms that may implement them, and the functions that they can play. The contributions of the second, third, and fourth parts focus on the three classes of the aforementioned intrinsic-motivation mechanisms. The contributions of the fifth part discuss mechanisms that are complementary to intrinsic motivations. The contributions of the sixth part introduce tools and experimental paradigms that can be used to investigate intrinsic motivations.
1 Intrinsically Motivated Learning The capacity to learn autonomously and in a cumulative fashion is one of the hallmarks of intelligence. Higher mammals, especially when young, engage in a number of exploratory activities with the environment (e.g. think about children at play; von Hofsten 2007). These activities are not directed to pursue goals that are directly relevant for the survival and reproduction of the organism, but are driven by intrinsic motivations, that is, motivations such as curiosity, interest in novel stimuli or surprising events, and interest in learning new behaviours. The adaptive value of intrinsically motivated activities is that they allow the cumulative acquisition
G. Baldassarre () M. Mirolli Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies, CNR, Roma, Italy e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] G. Baldassarre and M. Mirolli (eds.), Intrinsically Motivated Learning in Natural and Artificial Systems, DOI 10.1007/978-3-642-32375-1 1, © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013
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of knowledge and skills that can be later used (e.g. in adulthood) to accomplish fitness enhancing goals (Baldassarre 2011; Singh et al. 2010). Intrinsic motivations continue to operate also during adulthood, and indeed in humans they underlie lifelong learning and other typically human activities such as art and scientific discovery (Schmidhuber 2010). Interestingly, intrinsic motivations are also the basis of processes that strongly affect human well-being, such as the sense of competence, self-determination, and self-esteem (Ryan and Deci 2000). The concept of intrinsic motivation was introduced in the 1950s in animal psychology (Harlow 1950) and was further elaborated in human psychology (Deci 1975; Deci and Ryan 1985), where it is now widely applied, especially in the fields of educational psychology (e.g. Kohn 1993), developmental psychology (e.g. Harter 1981), and organisational psychology (Houkes et al. 200
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