Autonomous visual exploration creates developmental change in familiarity and novelty seeking behaviors

Perone, Sammy and Spencer, John P. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7320-144X (2013) Autonomous visual exploration creates developmental change in familiarity and novelty seeking behaviors. Frontiers in Psychology, 4. ISSN 1664-1078

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Abstract

What motivates children to radically transform themselves during early development? We addressed this question in the domain of infant visual exploration. Over the first year, infants' exploration shifts from familiarity to novelty seeking. This shift is delayed in preterm relative to term infants and is stable within individuals over the course of the first year. Laboratory tasks have shed light on the nature of this familiarity-to-novelty shift, but it is not clear what motivates the infant to change her exploratory style. We probed this by letting a Dynamic Neural Field (DNF) model of visual exploration develop itself via accumulating experience in a virtual world. We then situated it in a canonical laboratory task. Much like infants, the model exhibited a familiarity-to-novelty shift. When we manipulated the initial conditions of the model, the model's performance was developmentally delayed much like preterm infants. This delay was overcome by enhancing the model's experience during development. We also found that the model's performance was stable at the level of the individual. Our simulations indicate that novelty seeking emerges with no explicit motivational source via the accumulation of visual experience within a complex, dynamical exploratory system.

Item Type: Article
Additional Information: © 2013 Perone and Spencer. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
Uncontrolled Keywords: dynamic neural fields,dynamic systems,intrinsic motivation,visual exploration
Faculty \ School: Faculty of Social Sciences > School of Psychology
UEA Research Groups: Faculty of Social Sciences > Research Groups > Developmental Science
Depositing User: Pure Connector
Date Deposited: 13 Nov 2015 16:00
Last Modified: 28 Oct 2022 14:30
URI: https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/55229
DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00648

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