Abstract
How can we characterize perceptual activity from the standpoint of information theory? There are obviously several lines of approach. First, functionally, we may consider perception as the organism’s answer to the challenge of redundancy in the flux of environmental events to which an adaptive response is required— or rather, redundancy in the sequence of adaptive responses required [1–4], Perception is concerned with the statistically stable or quasi-stable features of the environment. Percepts are essentially regularities or compounds of regularities persistent or recurrent over a significant interval of space and/or time, and hence capable of becoming reflected in the adaptive organizing system.
Revised, version of a paper read at the Cambridge Conference on Thinking, Sept. 1955, under the title, “Some Perceptual Problems in Terms of Information Flow.”
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References
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MacKay, D.M. (1962). Theoretical Models of Space Perception. In: Muses, C.A., McCulloch, W.S. (eds) Aspects of the Theory of Artificial Intelligence. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-6584-4_5
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