This seems like a chicken or egg proposition.
If the critter is exploring when it is not hungry or thirsty and maps out what is in its territory is that curiosity or some aspect of hunger? Is that exploration without any other currently active drive pure curiosity?
When you search through your memory of location and goals and they match up to your current drive (hunger/thirst/shelter/mate) so you experience some reinforcing signal (AH-HA!) is that internal search part of those drives or some sort of separate general mechanism that services all drives?
I see that you have identified curiosity as a key feature of AGI.
Speech evolved from the intersection of signalling calls and object representation. Once you have shared naming and cultural reinforcement the rest of speech mechanisms fall into place. I bring this up because many of the traits that we would like to attribute to an HGI are in fact properties of the motor programming of speech recognition and subsequent mimicking/production (loaded programs?) and are not actually what might be considered pure hardware.
I place our use of the basic exploration to populate mental maps in the same general category. Yes, in humans it is a very developed trait, but it is an elaboration of a very basic drive - not something that is novel to human level intelligence.