Sensing success and failure
Barry Hutton · 2013
All behaviour is driven by motives of some sort or another. Motives may be quite simple and vague, almost unconscious. Watching a young child playing is intriguing – repeated attempts are made to put things inside or on top of one another. There is clearly a task to be achieved, and the child learns how to do it by repeated trials, errors and corrections. That can only work if there is a memory of the motive, of what has been done and of what the outcomes were, something which we and other animals do instinctively and unconsciously. Cyberneticists term the process ‘error-actuated feedback’.