Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uwm.edu!wuarchive!decwrl!ucbvax!cogsci.berkeley.edu!edwards From: edwards@cogsci.berkeley.edu (Jane Edwards) Newsgroups: comp.ai.neural-nets Subject: Re: the baby bootstrap (determining input...) Summary: Is curiosity simply a new label for behavior it is to explain? Keywords: drives, curiosity, George Kelly Message-ID: <34955@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> Date: 15 Mar 90 10:52:21 GMT References: <725@berlioz.nsc.com> <720@berlioz.nsc.com> <6603@hydra.gatech.EDU> <5061@ccncsu.ColoState.EDU> <5130@ccncsu.ColoState.EDU> <4972@newton.praxis.co.uk> Sender: usenet@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Reply-To: edwards@cogsci.berkeley.edu (Jane Edwards) Organization: University of California, Berkeley Lines: 60 In article <5130@ccncsu.ColoState.EDU> ld231782@longs.LANCE.ColoState.Edu (Lawrence Detweiler) writes: >The most plausible case for "supervised" (manipulated) learning in the >baby is in the sensations of pleasure and pain. Presumably these are >"hardwired". But how much of a baby's behavior is goverened by merely >direct (physical) sensation of pleasure and pain? I think one can see >that the vast majority of human experience is free of these direct >reinforcements that appear to be the only possible biological analogues >of manipulative learning. In article <4972@newton.praxis.co.uk> cdh@praxis.co.uk (Chris Hayward) writes: [lots deleted] >. . . >The key point, I think, is that if we include *curiosity* as a primary >motivator, everything else falls into place. It provides the bootstrap. In article kp@amdahl.uts.amdahl.com (Ken Presting) writes: >I can't help with the discussion itself, but here is pointer >to some (relatively obscure) literature. > >George Kelly wrote a book called "A Theory of Personality" which does >almost exactly what Chris suggests. Kelly's work seems to have been >swamped by the larger cognitivist movement in psychology, but he is >still mentioned in introductory survey texts on personality. It seems to me that there are a couple of things getting mixed up here. The idea of a need for varied experience is alive and well in personality and social psychology and as well as a reputable history (in such areas as sensory deprivation research, and the interesting book _Functions of varied experience_, Fiske & Maddi 1961). In fact, even food-deprived rats seem to have a need for it - i.e., will press a lever for light stimulation rather than merely for food - so it is certainly not specific to only a few species. But a need for varied experience is quite different from curiosity, I think. It wouldn't seem right to say that the rats pressed the lever out of curiosity. There are two further questions, though: Are there any independent manifestations of curiosity besides the behavior which it is being invoked to explain (i.e., sensation-seeking or cognitive mastery)? If not, then curiosity as a motivator or drive runs into a problem of _circularity_ which is faced by all "drive"-type explanation. It's like explaining why people drink wine by positing a wine-drinking drive. It is only superficially an explanation - in actuality, though, really just a relabelling of what needs to be explained. Can "curiosity" increase the accuracy of our predictions of behavior? Probably not. This is probably the main reason that emotions are seldom mentioned in cognitive research. They tend to have global effects which are context dependent, diffuse and poorly understood, espcially in humans. In order to gain precision by using curiosity to explain/predict behavior, we would first need a theory of curiosity, including what is most and least attention-getting under which situations, etc. And once we had those kinds of hierarchies perhaps that would be theory enough so that we wouldn't need to invoke curiosity in addition. Or so it seems to me. Jane Edwards (edwards@cogsci.berkeley.edu) UC Berkeley