ArticleNature human behaviour2023
Empowerment contributes to exploration behaviour in a creative video game.
Article in Nature human behaviour, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers.
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Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed.
- Semantic knowledge guides innovation and drives cultural evolution.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Cognitive modeling of real-world behavior for understanding mental health.Trends in cognitive sciences · 2026Review
- Separable cognitive and motor decline tracked across adult life-span for goal-directed navigation.iScience · 2025Article
- Leveling up fun: learning progress, expectations, and success influence enjoyment in video games.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Novelty as a drive of human exploration in complex stochastic environments.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Adaptive planning depth in human problem-solving.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- The Animal-AI Environment: A virtual laboratory for comparative cognition and artificial intelligence research.Behavior research methods · 2025Article
- The CuriousOpen mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2025Article
- Individual differences in information demand have a low dimensional structure predicted by some curiosity traits.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Testing the convergent validity, domain generality, and temporal stability of selected measures of people's tendency to explore.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Using games to understand the mind.Nature human behaviour · 2024Review
- Human decision making balances reward maximization and policy compression.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- Psychological empowerment and challenge-oriented organizational citizenship behavior: a dual process model.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Developmental psychologists should adopt citizen science to improve generalization and reproducibility.Infant and child developmentArticle
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Studies of human exploration frequently cast people as serendipitously stumbling upon good options. Yet these studies may not capture the richness of exploration strategies that people exhibit in more complex environments. Here we study behaviour in a large dataset of 29,493 players of the richly structured online game 'Little Alchemy 2'. In this game, players start with four elements, which they can combine to create up to 720 complex objects. We find that players are driven not only by external reward signals, such as an attempt to produce successful outcomes, but also by an intrinsic motivation to create objects that empower them to create even more objects. We find that this drive for empowerment is eliminated when playing a game variant that lacks recognizable semantics, indicating that people use their knowledge about the world and its possibilities to guide their exploration. Our results suggest that the drive for empowerment may be a potent source of intrinsic motivation in richly structured domains, particularly those that lack explicit reward signals.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.