the action selection mechanism (asm) determines not only the agent's actions in terms of impact on the world, but also directs its perceptual attention, and updates its memory. these egocentric sorts of actions may in turn result in modifying the agent's basic behavioural capacities, particularly in that updating memory implies some form of machine learning is possible. ideally, action selection itself should also be able to learn and adapt, but there are many problems of combinatorial complexity and computational tractability that may require restricting the search space for learning.