Self-organization of early vocal development in infants and machines: the role of intrinsic motivation

By Clément Moulin-Frier, Sao Mai Nguyen, Pierre-Yves Oudeyer. 2014

170 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We bridge the gap between two issues in infant development: vocal development and intrinsic motivation. We propose and experimentally test the hypothesis that general mechanisms of intrinsically motivated spontaneous exploration, also called curiosity-driven learning, can self-organize developmental stages during early vocal learning. We introduce a computational model of intrinsically motivated vocal exploration, which allows the learner to autonomously structure its own vocal experiments, and thus its own learning schedule, through a drive to maximize competence progress. This model relies on a physical model of the vocal tract, the auditory system and the agent's motor control as well as vocalizations of social peers. We present computational experiments that show how such a mechanism can explain the adaptive transition from vocal self-exploration with little influence from the speech environment, to a later stage where vocal exploration becomes influenced by vocalizations of peers. Within the initial self-exploration phase, we show that a sequence of vocal production stages self-organizes, and shares properties with data from infant developmental psychology: the vocal learner first discovers how to control phonation, then focuses on vocal variations of unarticulated sounds, and finally automatically discovers and focuses on babbling with articulated proto-syllables. As the vocal learner becomes more proficient at producing complex sounds, imitating vocalizations of peers starts to provide high learning progress explaining an automatic shift from self-exploration to vocal imitation.

Subfields: Cultural Studies, Developmental and Educational Psychology, Pharmacy, Robotics & Control, Cognitive Science & Psychology

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Citations in the corpus

What can the brain teach us about building artificial intelligence? (2016, background): “ example, the structure of early infant vocal development self-organizes spontaneously from such intrinsically motivated exploration, in interaction with the physical properties of the vocal systems (Moulin-Frier et al., 2014). New experimental paradigms in psychology and neuroscience were recently ”
Intrinsic motivations and open-ended development in animals, humans, and robots: an overview (2014, background): “Other researchers have proposed robots capable of detecting and focussing on novel stimuli (e.g., Marsland et al., 2005), or systems capable of detecting anomalies in datasets (Nehmzow et al., 2013).”
How Evolution May Work Through Curiosity-Driven Developmental Process (2016, background): “Figure 1 (B) outlines a computational architecture, called R-IAC (Oudeyer, Kaplan et al. 2007; Moulin-Frier et al., 2014).”
GRAIL: A Goal-Discovering Robotic Architecture for Intrinsically-Motivated Learning (2016, background): “skill to train [51], [74], [77], others on different aspects such as vision [45], speech development [55], or emotions [58].”
Intrinsic motivation, curiosity, and learning: Theory and applications in educational technologies. (2016, background): “3B outlines a computational architecture, called R-IAC (Moulin-Frier et al., 2014; Oudeyer et al., 2007).”