What is intrinsic motivation? A typology of computational approaches

2007/01/01 by Pierre‐Yves Oudeyer · 10 citations
Psychology · Neuroscience · #Child and Animal Learning Development #Psychological and Educational Research Studies #Memory and Neural Mechanisms

paper · pdf · doi:10.3389/neuro.12.006.2007

openalex publication_date 2007/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29

Abstract

Intrinsic motivation, centrally involved in spontaneous exploration and curiosity, is a crucial concept in developmental psychology. It has been argued to be a crucial mechanism for open-ended cognitive development in humans, and as such has gathered a growing interest from developmental roboticists in the recent years. The goal of this paper is threefold. First, it provides a synthesis of the different approaches of intrinsic motivation in psychology. Second, by interpreting these approaches in a computational reinforcement learning framework, we argue that they are not operational and even sometimes inconsistent. Third, we set the ground for a systematic operational study of intrinsic motivation by presenting a formal typology of possible computational approaches. This typology is partly based on existing computational models, but also presents new ways of conceptualizing intrinsic motivation. We argue that this kind of computational typology might be useful for opening new avenues for research both in psychology and developmental robotics.

Citations

• Motivation reconsidered: The concept of competence.
• Between MDPs and semi-MDPs: A framework for temporal abstraction in reinforcement learning
• Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction

Cited by

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• Curiosity-Critic: Cumulative Prediction Error Improvement as a Tractable Intrinsic Reward for World Model Training
• Order and change in art: towards an active inference account of aesthetic experience
• Unrewarded Exploration in Large Language Models Reveals Latent Learning from Psychology
• A computational model of infant sensorimotor exploration in the mobile paradigm
• Human Perception of Intrinsically Motivated Autonomy in Human-Robot Interaction
• Intrinsic motivation (artificial intelligence) [wikipedia]