Mechatronic Board for Studying Intrinsic Motivation-driven Learning in Children and Robots

We illustrate research run within the EU project IM-CLeVeR (“Intrinsically Motivated Cumulative Learning Versatile Robots”) that aims to investigate learning of actionoutcome associations based on intrinsic motivations, and action recall based on outcome re-activation. The research is based on: (a) the implementation of a “mechatronic board” suitable to investigate learning based on intrinsic motivations; (b) empirical experiments run with children; (c) a system-level bio-constrained computational embodied model aiming to interpret the results and to formulate an hypothesis on the brain mechanisms generating them. Intrinsic motivations differ from extrinsic motivations, based on events such as food intake and sex, in that they are related to drives to explore, novelty of stimuli, the success in achieving own goals, etc., maximally apparent in children at play. The experiments show how intrinsic motivations can drive the learning of action-outcome associations that, in a later stage, allow children to readily recall the execution of an action if its outcome becomes desirable (i.e., becomes a “goal”). The model furnishes the first system-level operational hypothesis on the brain mechanisms that might underly action-outcome learning based on intrinsic motivations. The model architecture and functioning is constrained on the basis of known relevant system-level neuroscientific evidence, and is validated with tests run with both the simulated and real humanoid robot iCub.