wednesday, 20 may 2026—12:15
Lauriane Rat-Fischer - Self-Generated Goals in Infants: Experimental Evidence and Insights from Computational Models of Curiosity
Lauriane Rat-Fischer, Paris Nanterre
Children are curious and active learners who spontaneously explore their environment through intrinsic motivation. While this autonomy is a hallmark of human development, the precise behavioral mechanisms that allow infants to self-generate goals remain under-explored. In this talk, I will present detailed behavioral analyses from a tool-use experiment with 21-month-olds, focusing on their exploratory patterns at a dense timescale. The results demonstrate that infants autonomously select and pursue their own alternative goals, often diverging from the explicit task objective. To contextualize these findings, I will compare these empirical patterns with recent computational models of intrinsic motivation (Forestier et al., 2022). In these models, robotic agents learn complex skills by self-organizing their own curriculum. This comparison highlights how 21-month-olds’ exploratory behavior aligns with such artificial frameworks and underscores the fundamental challenges this synergy poses for future experimental developmental psychology.
If you are not able to attend the seminar in person, it will also be possible to follow the seminar with this Teams link: https://bit.ly/4eThco6