analysis (brain region, neuron, synapse) with a functional vocabulary, a framework for analysis of
behavior with no necessary commitment to hypotheses on the localization of each schema (unit of
functional analysis), but which can be linked to a structural analysis whenever appropriate. Schemas
provide a high-level vocabulary which can be shared by brain theorists, cognitive scientists,
connectionists, ethologists and even kinesiologists, even though the implementation of the schemas may
differ from domain to domain. The present article presents a general perspective, notes but does not
emphasize learning models for schemas, and focuses on two issues: structuring perceptual and motor
schemas to provide an action-oriented account of behavior and cognition (as relevant to the roboticist as
the ethologist), and to the issue of how schemas describing animal behavior may be mapped to
interacting regions of the brain. Schema-based modeling becomes part of neuroscience when constrained
by data provided by, e.g., human brain mapping, studies of the effects of brain lesions, or
neurophysiology. The resulting model may constitute an adequate explanation in itself or may provide
the framework for modeling at the level of neural networks or below. Such a neural schema theory
provides a functional/structural decomposition, in strong contrast with models which employ learning
rules to train a single, otherwise undifferentiated, neural network to respond as specified by some
training set.
