Intrinsic motivations and open-ended development in animals, humans, and robots: an overview

摘要

This editorial article introduces the Frontiers Research Topic and Electronic Book (eBook) on Intrinsic Motivations (IMs), which involved the publication of 24 articles with the journals Frontiers in Psychology – Cognitive Science and Frontiers in Neurorobotics. The main objective of this Frontiers Research Topic is to present state-of-the-art research on IMs and open-ended development from an interdisciplinary perspective involving human and animal psychology, neuroscience, and computational perspectives. We first introduce in this section the main themes and concepts on IMs from different interdisciplinary perspectives. These themes and concepts have been reviewed more extensively in other works (e.g., see Barto et al., 2004; Oudeyer and Kaplan, 2007; Mirolli and Baldassarre, 2013; Barto, 2013), but they are briefly reported here both to meet the needs of the reader new to the field and to introduce the concepts and terms we use in the succeeding sections. In the next four sections, we give an overview of the Topic contributions grouped by four themes. A final section draws the conclusions.