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Cited by 494Psychological and Educational Research StudiesReinforcement Learning in RoboticsMemory and Neural Mechanisms

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 128 of the 128 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Towards a neuroscience of active sampling and curiosity

Gottlieb, Jacqueline, Oudeyer, Pierre-Yves·2018·Nature Reviews Neuroscience
DOI 10.1038/s41583-018-0078-0
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Abstract

In natural behaviour, animals actively interrogate their environments using endogenously generated 'question-and-answer' strategies. However, in laboratory settings participants typically engage with externally imposed stimuli and tasks, and the mechanisms of active sampling remain poorly understood. We review a nascent neuroscientific literature that examines active-sampling policies and their relation to attention and curiosity. We distinguish between information sampling, in which organisms reduce uncertainty relevant to a familiar task, and information search, in which they investigate in an open-ended fashion to discover new tasks. We review evidence that both sampling and search depend on individual preferences over cognitive states, including attitudes towards uncertainty, learning progress and types of information. We propose that, although these preferences are non-instrumental and can on occasion interfere with external goals, they are important heuristics that allow organisms to cope with the high complexity of both sampling and search, and generate curiosity-driven investigations in large, open environments in which rewards are sparse and ex ante unknown.

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Research works printed but not linked: 7

  1. Forestier, S. & Oudeyer, P. Y. in Proc. IEEE/RSJ Int. Conf. on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) 3965–3972 (IEEE, 2016). · DOI
  2. Forestier, S. & Oudeyer, P. Y. in Proc. 39th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Soc. 2013–2018 (Cogsci, 2017).
  3. Lopes, M. & Oudeyer, P.-Y. in Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. on Development and Learning and Epigenetic Robotics (ICDL) 1–8 (IEEE, 2012). · DOI
  4. Barto, A., Singh, S. & Chenatez, N. in Proc. 3rd Int. Conf. Dvp. Learn 112–119 (San Diego, CA, 2004).
  5. Schmidhuber, J. in Proc. Int. Joint Conf. Neural Networks 2, 1458–1463 (IEEE, 1991). · DOI
  6. Bellemare, M. et al. in Proc. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 29 Conf. 1471–1479 (NIPS, 2016).
  7. Kulkarni, T. D., Narasimhan, K., Saeedi, A. & Tenenbaum, J. B. in Proc. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 29 Conf. 3675–3683 (NIPS, 2016).

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Metadata

Authors
Gottlieb, J., & Oudeyer, P.-Y.
Affiliations
  • Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute (US)
  • Institut national de recherche en sciences et technologies du numérique (FR)
Corresponding author
Gottlieb, Jacqueline
ORCID
Venue
Nature Reviews Neuroscience
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Published
2018-11-05
Volume
19
Issue
12
Pages
758-770
ISSN
  • 1471-003X (ISSN-L)
  • 1471-0048
DOI
10.1038/s41583-018-0078-0
OpenAlex
W2899529983
Cited by
494
References
128
Citations by year
2026: 39 · 2025: 68 · 2024: 53 · 2023: 136 · 2022: 49 · 2021: 67 · 2020: 55 · 2019: 26
FWCI
5.90
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed
Licence
www.springer.com/tdm (tdm)
Locations
  • Nature reviews. Neuroscience (publishedVersion)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
  • HAL (submittedVersion)
Funders
National Eye Institute (P30EY019007)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Psychological and Educational Research Studies
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Reinforcement Learning in Robotics
  • Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Memory and Neural Mechanisms
Keywords
active sampling, curiosity, information sampling, information search, attention, uncertainty, cognitive states, exploration, learning progress, sparse rewards, open environments
MeSH terms
Animals, Attention, Brain, Cognition, Exploratory Behavior, Humans, Neurosciences, Reward

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