We have seen that field computation deals with information
processing in terms of fields, which may be described as
continuous distributions of data.
Many neural phenomena are conveniently described as fields,
including neuron activity from large (brain area) to small
(dendritic) scales,
and it is often useful to describe motor control and
sensorimotor coordination in terms of external fields such as
force fields and sensory images.
We have surveyed the basic concepts of field computation,
including both feed-forward field operations and field
dynamics resulting from recurrent connections.
Adaptive and learning mechanisms were discussed briefly.
The application of field computation to motor control was
illustrated by several examples:
external force fields associated with spinal neurons,
population coding of direction in motor cortex,
continuous transformation of direction fields,
and
linear gain fields and coordinate transformations in posterior parietal
cortex.
Next we surveyed some field-based representations of motion,
including direct, Fourier, Gabor and wavelet or multiresolution
representations.
Finally we considered briefly the application of these representations
to constraint satisfaction, which has many applications in motor
control.