Inferring space from sensorimotor dependencies

We consider the hypothesis that in biological organisms, the perceived structure of reality, in particular the notions of body, environment, space, object, and attribute, could be a consequence of an effort on the part of brains to account for the dependency between their inputs and their outputs in terms of a small number of parameters. To validate this idea, a procedure is demonstrated whereby the brain of an organism with arbitrary input and output connectivity can deduce the dimensionality of the rigid group of the space underlying its input-output relationship, that is the dimension of what the organism will call physical space.

Philipona, D., O Regan, J.K., Nadal, J.-P. and Coenen, O. J.-M. D. Perception of the structure of the physical world using multimodal unknown sensors and effectors. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 16, 2004. [PDF]

Philipona, D., O Regan, J.K. and Nadal, J.-P. Is there something out there? Inferring space from sensorimotor dependencies. Neural Computation, 15(9):2029-2049 2003. [PDF]