Figure 5. The three phases of the LIDA cognitive cycle.

A stimulus comes in from the environment via the senses. The perception sub-process includes obtaining this data, detecting features, and recognizing objects, categories and events. The understanding sub-process includes making sense of the perceived information and selecting the most relevant, urgent or novel information, which is included in the conscious broadcast (the agent is only consciously aware of the contents of this broadcast). Finally, the action selection sub-process selects the action best serving the agent's goals, based on the conscious broadcast contents.