Coordinate-free sensorimotor processing: computing with population codes.

The purpose of the study is to outline a computational architecture for the intelligent processing of sensorimotor patterns. The focus is on the nature of the internal representations of the outside world which are necessary for planning and other goal-oriented functions. A model of cortical map dynamics and self-organization is proposed that integrates a number of concepts and methods partly explored in the field. The novelty and the biological plausibility is related to the global architecture which allows one to deal with sensorimotor patterns in a coordinate-free way, using population codes as distributed internal representations of external variables and the coupled dynamics of cortical maps as a general tool of trajectory formation. The basic computational features of the model are demonstrated in the case of articulatory speech synthesis and some of the metric properties are evaluated by means of simple simulation studies.