Sensory - motor coordination: The metaphor and beyond

Any agent in the real world has to be able to make distinctions between different types of objects, i.e. it must have the competence of categorization. In mobile agents, there is a large variation in proximal sensory stimulation originating from the same object. Therefore, categorization behavior is hard to achieve, and the successes in the past in solving this problem, have been limited. In this paper it is proposed that the problem of categorization in the real world is significantly simplified if it is viewed as one of sensory-motor coordination, rather than one of information processing happening “on the input side”. A series of models is presented to illustrate the approach. It is concluded that we should consider replacing the metaphor of information processing for intelligent systems by the one of sensory-motor coordination. But the principle of sensory-motor coordination is more than a metaphor. It offers concrete mechanisms for putting agents to work in the real world. These ideas are illustrated with a series of experiments.