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Original Research ARTICLE

What is intrinsic motivation? A typology of computational approaches

Pierre-Yves Oudeyer^1,2* and Frederic Kaplan³

Sony Computer Science Laboratory Paris, Paris, France

INRIA Bordeaux-Sud-Ouest, France

Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, EPFL – CRAFT, Lausanne, Switzerland

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.

Keywords:

intrinsic motivation, cognitive development, reward, reinforcement learning, exploration, curiosity, computational modeling, artificial intelligence, developmental robotics

Citation:

Oudeyer P-Y and Kaplan F (2007). What is intrinsic motivation? A typology of computational approaches. Front. Neurorobot. 1:6. doi: 10.3389/neuro.12.006.2007

Received:

06 September 2007;

Paper pending published:

09 October 2007;

Accepted:

27 October 2007;

Published online:

02 November 2007

Edited by:

Max Lungarella, University of Zurich, Switzerland

Reviewed by:

Jeffrey L. Krichmar, The Neurosciences Institute, USA
Cornelius Weber, Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, Germany

© 2007 Oudeyer and Kaplan. This is an open-access article subject to an exclusive license agreement between the authors and the Frontiers Research Foundation, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original authors and source are credited.

*Correspondence:

Pierre-Yves Oudeyer, Sony Computer Science Laboratory Paris, 6 rue Amyot, 75005 Paris, France. e-mail: py@csl.sony.fr