Development of goal-directed action selection guided by intrinsic motivations: an experiment with children

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.