Excerpt: A simple thought experiment may be useful to understand our model. Imagine you reach your hand into a black box and try to determine what object is in the box, say a coffee cup. Using only one finger it is unlikely you could identify the object with a single touch. However, after making one contact with the cup, you move your finger and touch another location, and then another. After a few touches, you identify the object as a coffee cup. Recognizing the cup requires more than just the tactile sensation from the finger, the brain must also integrate knowledge of how the finger is moving, and hence where it is relative to the cup. Once you recognize the cup, each additional movement of the finger generates a prediction of where the finger will be on the cup after the movement, and what the finger will feel when it arrives at the new location. This is the first problem we wanted to address, how a small sensory array (e.g., the tip of a finger) can learn a predictive model of three dimensional objects by integrating sensation and movement-derived location information.