Evolving Action Selection and Selective Attention without Actions, Attention, or Selection

Abstract

A minimal animat architecture, consisting only of a set of autonomous, direct, and continuously active sensorimotor links, is shown to support a full range of `action selection' phenomena. A genetic algorithm is used to engineer the activation functions supported by these links. No `actions' are `selected' in this model, and the use of artificial evolution means that there is no artificial separation of the problems of `link design' from `link fusion'. Implications are drawn for how the concepts of `action selection' and `selective attention' may relate to the idea of coherence between sensorimotor processes.