What drives our curiosity remains an elusive and hotly debated issue, with multiple
hypotheses proposed but a cohesive account yet to be established. This review discusses …

The desire to reduce the dependence on curated, labeled datasets and to leverage the vast
quantities of unlabeled data has triggered renewed interest in unsupervised (or self …

New efforts are using head cameras and eye-trackers worn by infants to capture everyday
visual environments from the point of view of the infant learner. From this vantage point, the …

Recent years have seen a considerable surge of research on interest-based engagement,
examining how and why people are engaged in activities without relying on extrinsic …

Humans have a protracted postnatal helplessness period, typically attributed to human-
specific maternal constraints causing an early birth when the brain is highly immature. By …

Curiosity-driven learning is foundational to human cognition. By enabling humans to
autonomously decide when and what to learn, curiosity has been argued to be crucial for …

Infants are experts at playing, with an amazing ability to generate novel structured behaviors
in unstructured environments that lack clear extrinsic reward signals. We seek to …

For human infants, the first years after birth are a period of intense exploration—getting to
understand their own competencies in interaction with a complex physical and social …

Infants' remarkable learning abilities allow them to rapidly acquire many complex skills. It
has been suggested that infants achieve this learning by optimally allocating their attention …

Boredom is functional. Simplistically, it operates as a signal to do something other than what
you are doing now. But it is more nuanced than that. Animals must strike a balance between …