Many models of organism navigation concern themselves in essence just with the sequence of locations visited and how to manage it. However, larger and bulkier organisms have also to deal with managing momentum. We expect that this affects the cognitive management of movement. Here we propose a simple model for the information processing complexity of navigation when velocity and acceleration are considered, moving away from a kinematic perspective to a partially dynamic model, to separate the effects of location and momentum management. The work is discussed in the context of recent neurobiological research suggesting that biological agents plan around acceleration and deceleration phases, showing high neural activity during their body’s velocity changes.

Animals and humans encounter many tasks which permit ritualized behaviours, essentially fixed action sequences or “scripts”, similar to options known from Reinforcement Learning, but proceeding without intermediate decisions. While running a script, they proceed in an open-loop fashion. However even when these are already known, an agent needs to decide whether to perform a basic action or to trigger a script regarding the particular task. Here we study if including such scripts (i.e. behaviour rituals) is advantageous from the point of view of the relevant information required to take the decision to start such a script depending on the tasks. To achieve this, we modify the relevant information framework including sequences of basic actions to the possible actions.