Perception and action can be understood as the emergent property of various neural activity patterns that are triggered by external stimuli as well as internally generated signals, such as those pertaining to attention from the higher brain areas. But it is not clear how various neural patterns are responsible for behavior that underlies action and perception. It has been observed that the temporal coupling of neural events is responsible for various perceptual functions of the brain. For example, it has been seen that the temporal coupling of spatially segregated retinal neurons by gap junctions is necessary for the processing of spatial features of visual objects, such as the size and continuity. Findings from another study is consistent with the role of temporal coupling between specific sets of neurons during a time-production task. Neural events can be temporally coupled by at least two mechanisms, namely, coincidence detection and synchronization of a subset of brain areas by neural oscillations.

Moreover, the information that is processed is represented by the patterns of various oscillatory neural activities, such as the action potential and local field potential oscillations. The presence of an external stimulus, or internally generated signals, such as attention or mental thoughts would change the probability laws that govern the generation of neural oscillatory patterns, which is equivalent to information compression, leading to perception, action or even thoughts. The temporal coupling will be important for the binding of information represented by different neural patterns in different circuits for processing the perception and action. Temporal coupling of different networks responsible for action and/or perception would be enabled by the coupling of those networks to the same external task or stimulus.

This Research Topic seeks contributions from researchers working in different disciplines, which will shed light on the importance of the temporal coupling of information in perception and action. The manuscripts may include, but not limited to computational models, clinical cases, imaging studies, molecular studies and psychophysics.

Keywords: Perception and action, temporal processing of information, mutual information, attention, coincidental activation

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