General Architecture for Perception-action Information Flow Control

The perception-action (P-A) cycle is the process of receiving information about sensory events taking place in the environment through sensory systems, processing this information and triggering motor systems to initiate corresponding action events back into the environment. This information processing along the P-A pathway requires defining a certain level of dependency between the sensory events and their corresponding action events. This dependency is what determines the behavior of the system and its ability to implement its goals and to react to its environment. Information processing within the P-A process is based on the transmission of signals between the sensory and motor systems. This transmission is subject to noise. Noise leads to errors in the transmitted signals and reduces the amount of useful information carried by the signals, thus impacting the sensory-action dependency that can be defined by the organism. According to communication theory, managing information transmission along a channel is achieved by matching the messages to be transmitted with the specifics of that channel according to the statistical characteristics of the messages. The current paper argues that managing information transmission within the P-A process requires the brain to have dedicated information transmission control processes and structures. It is argued that one such control process is based on managing the mapping of the events involved in the P-A process to the signals used by the P-A process. The paper suggests the required structure that should enable the brain to access the required variables for managing the information transmission and examines the approach of the Theory of Event Coding.