Synthetic phenomenology and high-dimensional buffer hypothesis

Synthetic phenomenology typically focuses on the analysis of simplified perceptual signals with small or reduced dimensionality. Instead, synthetic phenomenology should be analyzed in terms of perceptual signals with huge dimensionality. Effective phenomenal processes actually exploit the entire richness of the dynamic perceptual signals coming from the retina. The hypothesis of a high-dimensional buffer at the basis of the perception loop that generates the robot synthetic phenomenology is analyzed in terms of a cognitive architecture for robot vision the authors have developed over the years. Despite the obvious computational problems when dealing with high-dimensional vectors, spaces with increased dimensionality could be a boon when searching for global minima. A simplified setup based on static scene analysis and a more complex setup based on the CiceRobot robot are discussed. © 2012 World Scientific Publishing Company.