Early Perception-Action Cycles in Binocular Vision: Visuomotor Paradigms and Cortical-like Architectures

Pushed by ample neurophysiological evidence of modulatory effects of motor and premotor signals on the visual receptive fields across several cortical areas, there is growing attention for moving the active vision paradigm from systems in which just the effects of action influence the perception, to systems where the acting itself, and even its planning, operate in parallel with perception. Such systems could close the loops and take full advantage of concurrent/anticipatory perception-action processing. In this context, cortical-like architectures for both vergence control and depth perception (in the 3D peripersonal space) that incorporate adaptive tuning mechanisms of the disparity detectors are presented. The proposed approach points out the advantages and the flexibility of distributed and hierarchical cortical-like architectures against solutions based on a conventional systemic coupling of sensing and motor components, which in general poses integration problems since processes must be coupled that are too heterogeneous and complex.