Computation in Cortical Nets

Abstract

The evolution of information processing has led to a mutual adaptation of sense organs, brains, and patterns of behavior. In order to understand how animals deal with visual information, it is important to consider the sequence in which the competence for the various patterns of visually guided behavior occurred; a review of this issue is given by Horridge /1/. Simple tasks, such as obstacle avoidance or exploration were solved prior to more complicated ones such as pattern recognition. Therefore, existing solutions to simple problems could serve as preadaptations on which the more sophisticated mechanisms for higher functions could improve. An example showing how preadaptations from a simple vision task can be used for a more complicated one has been presented by Reichardt & Poggio /2/ for a figure-ground discriminator based on simple motion detection. Another example is the development of elaborate eye-movements in mammals that reduces the relevance of position invariance in biological pattern recognition.