Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

International Initiatives

Inria Associate Teams

NEUROCURIOSITY

• Title: NeuroCuriosity

• Inria principal investigator: Manuel Lopes

• International Partner (Institution - Laboratory - Researcher):

  • Columbia Neuroscience (United States) - Jacqueline Goetlieb

• Duration: 2013 - 2015

• One of the most striking aspects of human behavior is our enormous curiosity, drive for exploration. From a child feverishly examining a new toy with its hands and its eyes, to a tourist exploring a new city, to a scientist studying the brain, humans incessantly want to know. This exuberant curiosity shapes our private and social lives, and is arguably a key cognitive feature that allows our species to understand, control and alter our world. We aim to develop a novel unified biological and computational theory, which explains curiosity in the domain of visual exploration and attention as a deliberate decision motivated by learning progress. This theory will build and improve upon pioneer computational models of intrinsic motivation elaborated in developmental robotics, and be empirically evaluated in the context of visual exploration in monkeys through behavioral and brain imaging techniques. This will be the first attempt at a biological-computational framework of intrinsic motivation and perceptual exploration and their underlying cognitive mechanisms. This collaboration involves Pierre-Yves Oudeyer and Manuel Lopes on the Inria side, and Jacqueline Gottlieb and Adrien Baranes on Univ. Columbia side.