Morphological computation: Synergy of body and brain

Abstract

There are numerous examples that show how the exploitation of the body's physicalproperties can lift the burden of the brain. Examples include grasping, swimming, locomotion,and motion detection. The term Morphological Computation was originally coined to describeprocesses in the body that would otherwise have to be conducted by the brain. In this paper, we arguefor a synergistic perspective, and by that we mean that Morphological Computation is a processwhich requires a close interaction of body and brain. Based on a model of the sensorimotor loop,we study a new measure of synergistic information and show that it is more reliable in cases inwhich there is no synergistic information, compared to previous results. Furthermore, we discuss analgorithm that allows the calculation of the measure in non-trivial (non-binary) systems.