title: 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.
authors.affiliation: Laboratory of Computational Embodied Neuroscience, Istituto di Scienze e Tecnologie della Cognizione, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (LOCEN-ISTC-CNR), Rome, Italy.
authors.forename: Daniele
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Caligiore
authors.affiliation: Laboratory of Computational Embodied Neuroscience, Istituto di Scienze e Tecnologie della Cognizione, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (LOCEN-ISTC-CNR), Rome, Italy.
authors.forename: Magda
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Mustile
authors.affiliation: Dipartimento di Informatica, Università di Roma "Sapienza", Rome, Italy.
authors.forename: Daniele
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Cipriani
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Peter
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Redgrave
authors.affiliation: Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies, Frankfurt, Germany.
authors.forename: Jochen
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Triesch
authors.affiliation: Dipartimento di Informatica, Università di Roma "Sapienza", Rome, Italy.
authors.forename: Maria
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: De Marsico
authors.affiliation: Laboratory of Computational Embodied Neuroscience, Istituto di Scienze e Tecnologie della Cognizione, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (LOCEN-ISTC-CNR), Rome, Italy.
authors.forename: Gianluca
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Baldassarre
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention; D005133:Eye Movements; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007858:Learning; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D009042:Motivation; D010775:Photic Stimulation / Q000379:methods; D055815:Young Adult