Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We address the question of how artificial systems and natural organisms develop spatial competence. Most artificial systems draw upon considerable sophisticated operator- or developer-originated knowledge about what in the world sensor signals represent. Natural systems do not have such sophisticated auxiliary sources of information. We are interested in how, despite this, they achieve perceptual organisation, and suspect that the methods they use will have generalisable effectiveness. We describe a process that creates coherent mappings between the physical world and the phenomenological realm, analogous to retinotopicity and sensory homuncularity in natural systems, and discuss its application to problems of higher dimensionality and higher levels of abstraction. Importantly, such a process, having proved successful in the perceptual robotics domain of our current interests, is likely to be found in other cognitive domains because its strengths lie in its ability to organise and implicitly summarise data in the absence of clues about what that data represents.