My purpose in this chapter is to introduce the general concepts of field computation and to describe some possible applications of it to motor control. Field computation deals with continuous distributions of activity such as are found in the topographic maps and other functional areas of the brain (Knudsen et al. 1987), but also with external distributions of quantity, such as force fields. In field computation we are generally concerned with the topology of the space over which a quantity is distributed; this contrasts with the common approach in neural network modeling, which treats neural activity as a vector, that is, as quantity distributed over a space with no significant topology (since the axes are independent and, in effect, all equally distant from each other).
After defining fields and surveying their occurrence in the
brain, I will give a brief introduction to the mathematics of
field computation and then consider
several problems in motor control from the perspective of
field computation.