Alexandr Ten PhD talk (2022): The role of progress-based intrinsic motivation in human learning
Channel: Inria Flowers
Date: 2023-01-16

This PhD thesis was defended at Inria/University of Bordeaux in 2022.


The Role of Progress-Based Intrinsic Motivation in Learning : Evidence from Human Behavior and Future Directions, by Alexandr Ten
Pdf of manuscript: https://www.theses.fr/2022BORD0152

=== Related papers:

Ten, A., Kaushik, P., Oudeyer, P. Y., & Gottlieb, J. (2021). Humans monitor learning progress in curiosity-driven exploration. Nature communications, 12(1), 1-10. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26196-w 


Ten, A., Gottlieb, J., & Oudeyer, P. Y. (2021). Intrinsic rewards in human curiosity-driven exploration: An empirical study. In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (Vol. 43, No. 43). https://escholarship.org/uc/item/13b6p5ms


Ten, A., Oudeyer, P. Y., & Moulin-Frier, C. (2022). Curiosity-Driven Exploration: : Diversity of mechanisms and functions? The Drive for Knowledge: The Science of Human Information Seeking, 53.
https://hal.inria.fr/hal-03447896/file/Ten2022Curiosity-driven.pdf

=== Abstract of manuscript


Intrinsic motivation – the desire to do things for their inherent joy and pleasure – has received its first share of scientific attention over 70years ago, ever since we saw monkeys solving puzzles for free. Since then, research on intrinsic motivation has been steadily gaining momentum. We have come to understand, in the context of learning and discovery, that intrinsic motivation (namely, intrinsically motivated information-seeking) is foundational for the biological and technological success of our species. But where does intrinsic motivation to learn and seek information come from? Today, with the thriving synergy between perpetually advancing fields of psychology, neuroscience, and computer science, we are well positioned to investigate this question. 


The Learning Progress Hypothesis (LPH) proposes that humans are motivated by feelings of and/or beliefs about progress in knowledge (including progress in competence). In artificial learners, progressbased intrinsic motivation enables autonomous exploration of the environment (including the agent’s own body), resulting in better performance, more efficient learning, and richer skill sets. Due to similar computational challenges facing artificial and biological learners, researchers have proposed that progress-based intrinsic motivation might have evolved in humans to help us transition from babies with few skills and little knowledge to knowledgeable grownups capable of performing many sophisticated tasks. The Learning Progress Hypothesis (LPH) is attractive, not only because it is consistent with several studies of human curiosity, but also because it resonates with existing theories on metacognitive self-regulation in learning. However, the LPH has not been extensively studied using behavioral experimentation.


This thesis provides an empirical examination of the LPH. We introduce a novel experimental paradigm where participants explore multiple learning activities, some easy, others difficult. The activities involve guessing the binary category of randomly presented stimuli. To let their intrinsic motivation shine, we did not provide any material incentives encouraging specific behaviors or strategies – we simply observed which activities people engaged in and how their knowledge about these activities unfolded over time. We present statistical analyses and a computational model that support the LPH.


This thesis also suggests ideas for future investigations into progressbased motivation. These ideas are inspired by a pilot study in which we asked participants to practice a naturalistic sensorimotor skill (a video game) over the course of 3 sessions spanning 5 days. At the end of each session, participants reported their subjective judgments of past and future progress, as well as their evolving beliefs about their perceived competence, self-efficacy beliefs, and intrinsic motivation. In support of the LPH, participants’ subjective judgments correlated with the objective improvement. However, contrary to the LPH’s prediction, objective and subjective progress measures did not show reliable rela- tionships with verbal and behavioral measures of intrinsic motivation. Instead, progress measures were in strong relationships with beliefs about task learnability, which in turn predicted intrinsic motivation. Based on these findings, we suggest a novel mechanism in which learning progress interacts with intrinsic motivation via subjective beliefs.



We conclude the thesis with an extended discussion of our findings, where we examine some limitations of our experiments and propose promising future steps. In summary, we believe the behavioral paradigms introduced in this thesis should be reused to not only replicate our results, but also to advance the scientific research of intrinsically motivated information-seeking.