Intrinsic Motivations Drive Learning of Eye Movements: An Experiment with Human Adults

Abstract

Intrinsic motivations drive the acquisition of knowledge and skills on the basis of novel or surprising stimuli or the pleasure to learn new skills. In so doing, they are different from extrinsic motivations that are mainly linked to drives that promote survival and reproduction. Intrinsic motivations have been implicitly exploited in several psychological experiments but, due to the lack of proper paradigms, they are rarely a direct subject of investigation. This article investigates how different intrinsic motivation mechanisms can support the learning of visual skills, such as “foveate a particular object in space”, using a gaze contingency paradigm. In the experiment participants could freely foveate objects shown in a computer screen. Foveating each of two “button” pictures caused different effects: one caused the appearance of a simple image (blue rectangle) in unexpected positions, while the other evoked the appearance of an always-novel picture (objects or animals). The experiment studied how two possible intrinsic motivation mechanisms might guide learning to foveate one or the other button picture. One mechanism is based on the sudden, surprising appearance of a familiar image at unpredicted locations, and a second one is based on the content novelty of the images. The results show the comparative effectiveness of the mechanism based on image novelty, whereas they do not support the operation of the mechanism based on the surprising location of the image appearance. Interestingly, these results were also obtained with participants that, according to a post experiment questionnaire, had not understood the functions of the different buttons suggesting that novelty-based intrinsic motivation mechanisms might operate even at an unconscious level.

Learning where to look with movement-based intrinsic motivations: A bio-inspired model

“…This addition might be based on the SOM network component learning to recognise different inputs [39]. This addition would allow the study of the interplay between prediction-based and noveltybased intrinsic motivations [25].…”

“…The model is tested with a setup inspired by the cognitive psychology experiment presented in [25]. This experiment uses the gaze-contingency paradigm 1 [26] in which participants can change the image of a computer screen by simply looking at some parts of it.…”

“…This paradigm is ideal for studying how looking actions can drive learning processes based on environment changes. In the psychological experiment presented in [25] participants learn to direct their gaze on button-like pictures on a computer screen and this causes the sudden appearance of other elements in the screen. Here we test our model with a setup inspired by these experiments with the goal of understanding if and how the SC detection of luminance changes can lead the agent to acquire skills that produce effects on the world while ignoring other changes happening independently of the agent's actions.…”

Autism Pathogenesis: The Superior Colliculus

“…At every moment we draw our attention to different targets and the most conspicuous behavior of our attentional interest is gaze direction. Non-conscious or conscious, driven by extrinsic motivations to promote survival or by intrinsic motivation guided by the pleasure to learn new skills (Caligiore et al, 2015), a simple gaze shift is always the result of a complex mechanism. The SC actively participates in each level of these processes (Corrigan et al, 2015).…”

A Developmental Learning Approach of Mobile Manipulator via Playing

“…In particular, a play phenomenon often accompanies the process of an infant skill development (Cangelosi et al, 2015 ), which has led to one infant development theory that infants develop relevant skills during play. The play of the early infant is driven primarily by intrinsic motivation (Oudeyer et al, 2007 ; Baldassarre and Mirolli, 2013 ; Caligiore et al, 2015 ), and an infant's development goal is implied in the game that the infant plays. This theory has not been applied and verified in developmental robotics.…”