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...

Motivation is an important factor in getting athletes to reach their maximal potential, but no questionnaire or scale observe motivation during exercise has been developed. Objective: The first aim of this study was test the validity and reliability a new French Multidimensional Scale Effort (MMSE) constructed determine Intrinsic (IM), External Regulation (ExtR), Introjected (IntroR), Identifie...

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 ...

The aim of this study has been to investigate the process of acceptance and use of technology by users, focusing on the role of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation in determining it. The key role of user's motivation in determining the usage behavior has been already investigated from previous research, but they have not focused on the process of microblogging acceptance. On the contrary of othe...

This essay seeks to clarify the paradigm shift from object-centered to human-centered research and design. It suggests abandoning the technological determinism that underlies the industrial era conceptions of humanmachine interactions, which still informs much of current human factors or ergonomic research and making room for models of human-machine interactions that are derived from the human ...

Economics is solidly based on the workings of incentives. Extra rewards will increase and extra costs will decrease the frequency of a particular type of behavior. In sociology, Weber had pointed to a kind of behavior that was presumably not steered by incentives: value-rational behavior, found in religions and strong reasoned convictions. Because of an increasing rationalization of the world, ...

Digital gaming is fast becoming a favorite activity all over the world. Yet very few studies have examined the underlying motivational processes involved in digital gaming. One motivational force that receives little attention in psychology is passion, which could help us understand the motivation of gamers. The purpose of the present study was to identify subgroups of young people with distinc...