ABSTRACT
This chapter develops the several ideas about information for sensory, perceptual, and cognitive processes. The generic problem of representing variations in one system by those in another occurs in many areas of science and technology such as measurement theory, perception, cognition, robotics, and neurophysiology. Relational structures of continuous spatiotemporal patterns are qualitatively different from those involving sets of discrete elements, such as symbols, objects. The effectiveness of a representation can be evaluated by empirical criteria: resolution, invariance under observational transformations, and context invariance. The spatial patterns of optical images and the spatiotemporal organization of acoustic patterns are essential carriers of environmental information for humans and other animals. At the center of Shannon's theory of communication were his elegant formulas for quantifying the complexity of a set of signals and rate of information transmission. Two-dimensional images in eyes, photographs, and paintings provide valuable information about 3-D scenes, but they cannot give a reliable representation of 3-D spatial relations among separate objects.
