A lot of this is discussed at length in the book The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception by Gibson. He put out a pretty radical idea that all cognition is goal driven, and perception is the action of converting sensory energy into scored models (scores are computed as anticipated experience of goal-fulfillment). Fundamentally, all thinking is planning. There's quite a bit of literature coming out on this in the fields of online learning theory and actionable information theory, in particular by Soatto at UCLA.