In order to explore the role of motivation in environmental cognition and imatate the environment cognitive behavior of creatures, this paper proposes a mobile robot environment cognitive model(CM-LA) combining the theory of intrinsic motivation with the framework of learning automata. The number of visits and the time interval between visits define the intrinsic motivation, and describe the impact of extrinsic motivation based on the principle of operant conditioning. At the same time, the designed action selection mechanism enables the robot to effectively avoid new obstacles based on existing environmental awareness. The experimental results show that the model can effectively and autonomously recognize the environment driven by two motivations, and improve the exploration efficiency of the robot in an unknown environment. The path length searched using this method is shorter with the ability of self-adaptation to the environment.