Animals both explore and avoid novel objects in the environment, but the neural
mechanisms that underlie these behaviors and their dynamics remain uncharacterized …

Perception of external objects involves sensory acquisition via the relevant sensory organs.
A widely-accepted assumption is that the sensory organ is the first station in a serial chain of …

What are the functions of curiosity? What are the mechanisms of curiosity-driven learning?
We approach these questions about the living using concepts and tools from machine …

Highlights•Curious robots select actions to maximize intrinsic rewards that quantify learning
progress.•Curious robots exhibit emergence of infant-like exploration behaviors.•Open …

Exploration of novel environments ensures survival and evolutionary fitness. It is expressed
through exploratory bouts and arrests that change dynamically based on experience. Neural …

Social interaction is an extremely complex yet vital component in daily life. We present a
bottom-up approach for the emergence of social behaviours from the interaction of the …

Most vertebrates use active sensing strategies for perception, cognition and control of motor
activity. These strategies include directed body/sensor movements or increases in discrete …

In the process of building machine learning models data sometimes must be sampled before
the learning process can be applied. This step, known as instance selection, is mostly done …

Active sensing behaviors reveal what an animal is attending to and how it changes with
learning. Gymnotus sp., a gymnotiform weakly electric fish, generates an electric organ …

Animals employ active touch to optimize the acuity of their tactile sensors. Prior experimental
results and models lead to the hypothesis that sensory inputs are used in a recurrent …