Jürgen Jost
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780262034326
- eISBN:
- 9780262333290
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- The MIT Press
- DOI:
- 10.7551/mitpress/9780262034326.003.0008
- Subject:
- Neuroscience, History of Neuroscience
A cognitive system is coupled to its environment via a sensorimotor loop. It receives signals from, and in turn acts upon, the environment, and the resulting actions influence the structure of future ...
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A cognitive system is coupled to its environment via a sensorimotor loop. It receives signals from, and in turn acts upon, the environment, and the resulting actions influence the structure of future signals. This chapter looks at several possible optimization principles for this loop, all of which have certain shortcomings. It argues for a more refined interaction where the actions create certain structural relations among the sensory data as well as between those data and the system’s movements. These relations induce correlations between neuronal activities, and it is argued that these correlations underlie percepts which correspond to a specific spatiotemporal neuronal pattern. Such a pattern is the result of a learning process that transforms correlations into associations.Less
A cognitive system is coupled to its environment via a sensorimotor loop. It receives signals from, and in turn acts upon, the environment, and the resulting actions influence the structure of future signals. This chapter looks at several possible optimization principles for this loop, all of which have certain shortcomings. It argues for a more refined interaction where the actions create certain structural relations among the sensory data as well as between those data and the system’s movements. These relations induce correlations between neuronal activities, and it is argued that these correlations underlie percepts which correspond to a specific spatiotemporal neuronal pattern. Such a pattern is the result of a learning process that transforms correlations into associations.
