This has been developed most comprehensively with respect to vision (active vision) where an agent (animal, robot, human, camera mount) changes position to improve the view of a specific object, or where an agent uses movement to perceive the environment (e.g., a robot avoiding obstacles).
The behavior of the agent (animal, robot, human) in the world generates a flow of data over the visual sensor (camera, eye), which is sampled by the sensor and interpreted into a percept of the environment by the agent, through some computation.
On the basis of this percept the agent selects another behavior that generates more data flow.
[6] The theory has held strong, although for the approximately 80 years that it has been around, it has always been considered a niche area of psychology.
[7] As one would expect, when optical flow is included in the definition of active perception then the volume of related work significantly increases.