Related Experiment Video
Updated: Nov 27, 2025
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Creating Objects and Object Categories for Studying Perception and Perceptual Learning
Published on: November 2, 2012
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Space Emerges from What We Know-Spatial Categorisations Induced by Information Constraints
Nicola Catenacci Volpi1, Daniel Polani1
1School of Engineering and Computer Science, University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield AL109AB, UK.
Entropy (Basel, Switzerland)
|December 8, 2020
Summary
Agents can develop sophisticated spatial understanding by balancing information use and location accuracy, even refining prior knowledge. This emergent spatial representation reflects environmental topology without explicit geometry.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Science
- Computational Neuroscience
- Information Theory
Background:
- Biological organisms possess an
- Agents require world-structure understanding for competent goal-seeking.
- Information processing constraints shape biologically plausible models.
Purpose of the Study:
- Investigate spatial categorizations emerging from informational constraints in embodied agents.
- Explore how agents develop spatial representations under limited information processing.
Main Methods:
- Utilized information theory, specifically Shannon information and the information bottleneck method.
- Modeled agents employing a trade-off between information minimization and location error reduction.
- Examined successive refinement of spatial descriptions.
Main Results:
- Geometrically-rich spatial representations emerged from balancing information minimization and location error.
- Agents optimally refined previously constructed spatial descriptions.
- Induced clusters reflected environmental topology without explicit geometric input.
Conclusions:
- Fundamental geometric notions can emerge as byproducts of parsimonious information processing, not requiring a priori knowledge.
- Informational constraints are key drivers of emergent spatial understanding in agents.
- The successive refinement principle ensures optimality in representational development.
Keywords:
geometric rate-distortioninformation bottleneckinformation theoryspatial cognitionsuccessive refinementMore Related Videos
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