title: Development of goal-directed action selection guided by intrinsic motivations: an experiment with children.
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.
authors.affiliation: Laboratory of Biomedical Robotics and Biomicrosystems, Università Campus Bio-Medico di Roma, Via A. del Portillo 21, 00128 , Rome, Italy, f.taffoni@unicampus.it.
authors.forename: Fabrizio
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Taffoni
authors.forename: Eleonora
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Tamilia
authors.forename: Valentina
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Focaroli
authors.forename: Domenico
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Formica
authors.forename: Luca
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Ricci
authors.forename: Giovanni
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Di Pino
authors.forename: Gianluca
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Baldassarre
authors.forename: Marco
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Mirolli
authors.forename: Eugenio
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Guglielmelli
authors.forename: Flavio
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Keller
mesh_terms: D000367:Age Factors; D002648:Child; D002657:Child Development / Q000502:physiology*; D002675:Child, Preschool; D002755:Choice Behavior / Q000502:physiology*; D005106:Exploratory Behavior; D005260:Female; D006040:Goals; D006801:Humans; D007858:Learning; D008297:Male; D009042:Motivation; D010988:Play and Playthings; D011597:Psychomotor Performance; D013997:Time Factors