Paid crowdsourcing platforms, which harness the extrinsic motivation of monetary compensation, are seeing increased usage for design feedback tasks, but the low quality of design feedback from crowdsourced workers continues to be a problem for designers. Intrinsic motivation has the potential to increase the quality of worker responses, but is difficult to elicit in paid workers. In this paper,...

Intrinsic motivation is a crucial mechanism for open-ended cognitive development since it is the driver of spontaneous exploration and curiosity. Yet, it has so far only been conceptualized in ad hoc manners in the epigenetic robotics community. After reviewing different approaches to intrinsic motivation in psychology, this paper presents a unified definition of intrinsic motivation, based on ...

If a person who is intrinsically motivated to perform an activity begins to receive external reinforcement for the activity, what will happen to his intrinsic motivation? Previous studies and the present study indicate that money decreases intrinsic motivation, while verbal reinforcements tend to enhance intrinsic motivation. The beginning of a cognitive evaluation theory is discussed, and an a...

One of the remarkable feats of intelligent life is that it restructures the world it lives in for its own benefit. Beavers build dams for shelter and to produce better hunting grounds, bees build hives for shelter and storage, humans have transformed the world in a multitude of ways. Intelligence is not only the ability to produce the right reaction to a randomly changing environment, but is al...

Motivation is a key factor in human learning. We learn best when we are highly motivated to learn. Psychologists distinguish between extrinsically-motivated behavior, which is behavior undertaken to achieve some externally supplied reward, such as a prize, a high grade, or a high-paying job, and intrinsically-motivated behavior, which is behavior done for its own sake. Is there an analogous dis...

In developmental robotics (Weng et al., 2001; Lungarella et al., 2003), one aims to investigate the mechanisms that may allow a robot to continuously discover and learn new skills in unknown environments and in a life-long time scale. Of particular importance is the fact that the set of these skills and their function(s) are at least partially unknown to the engineer who conceive the robot init...

Young children are born with an innate curiosity to learn about their world. This intrinsically instigated learning is often called mastery motivation. Patterns of motivation are established at an early age. The early childhood years are crucial for establishing robust intrinsic motivational orientations which will last a lifetime. By the time many children reach school, much of their motivatio...

One of the main challenges in the field of embodied artificial intelligence is the open-ended autonomous learning of complex behaviours. Our approach is to use task-independent, information-driven intrinsic motivation(s) to support task-dependent learning. The work presented here is a preliminary step in which we investigate the predictive information (the mutual information of the past and fut...

This paper examines mastery motivation in infants from birth to 3 years of age and outlines critical areas for parent and teacher involvement in the development of motivation, including recommended activities at each level. It asserts that from birth, children have an innate desire to learn about their world, quickly learning that they can control various elements within the environment and str...

We consider an agent’s uncertainty about its environment and the problem of generalizing this uncertainty across states. Specifically, we focus on the problem of exploration in non-tabular reinforcement learning. Drawing inspiration from the intrinsic motivation literature, we use density models to measure uncertainty, and propose a novel algorithm for deriving a pseudo-count from an arbitrary ...