The dynamics of perception and action.

Abstract

How might one account for the organization in behavior without attributing it to an internal control structure? The present article develops a theoretical framework called behavioral dynamics that integrates an information-based approach to perception with a dynamical systems approach to action. For a given task, the agent and its environment are treated as a pair of dynamical systems that are coupled mechanically and informationally. Their interactions give rise to the behavioral dynamics, a vector field with attractors that correspond to stable task solutions, repellers that correspond to avoided states, and bifurcations that correspond to behavioral transitions. The framework is used to develop theories of several tasks in which a human agent interacts with the physical environment, including bouncing a ball on a racquet, balancing an object, braking a vehicle, and guiding locomotion. Stable, adaptive behavior emerges from the dynamics of the interaction between a structured environment and an agent with simple control laws, under physical and informational constraints.Keywords: perception and action, perceptual-motor control, dynamical systems, self-organization, locomotionThe organization of behavior has been a central concern of psychology for well over a century. How is it that humans and other animals can generate behavioral patterns that are tightly coordinated with the environment, in the service of achieving a specific goal? This ability to produce stable yet adaptive behavior raises two constituent issues. On the one hand, it implicates the coordination of action, such that the many neuromusculoskeletal components of the body become temporarily organized into an ordered pattern of movement. On the other, it implicates perception, such that information about the world and the body enables appropriate actions to be selected and adapted to environmental conditions. At a basic level, the problem of the organization of behavior is thus synonymous with the problem of perception and action. Moreover, an adequate theory of perceptually controlled action would provide a platform for understanding more "cognitive" behavior such as extended action sequences, anticipatory behavior oriented to remote goals, or predictive behavior that takes account of hidden environmental properties.It seems natural to presume that observed organization in behavior implies ipso facto the existence of a centralized controller-a pattern generator, action plan, or internal model that is responsible for its organization and regulation. Such an assumption has been commonplace in psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience, and robotics. In each domain, organization in behavior has been attributed to prior organization in the structure of the nervous system (the neuroreductionist view), the structure of internal representations (the cognitivist view), or in the contingencies presented by the environment (the behaviorist view). This is unsatisfying because it merely displaces the original problem of behavioral organization to a preexist...

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