Perception
Intelligent biological systems are physically embodied in the world and experience the world through their sensors (senses). For an autonomous vehicle, input might be images from a camera and range information from a rangefinder. For a medical diagnosis system, perception is the set of symptoms and test results that have been obtained and input to the system manually
Reasoning
Inference, decision-making, classification from what is sensed and what the internal “model” is of the world. Might be a neural network, logical deduction system, Hidden Markov Model induction, heuristic searching a problem space, Bayes Network inference, genetic algorithms, etc.
Includes areas of knowledge representation, problem solving, decision theory, planning, game theory, machine learning, uncertainty reasoning, etc.
Action
Biological systems interact within their environment by actuation, speech, etc. All behavior is centered around actions in the world. Examples include controlling the steering of a Mars rover or autonomous vehicle, or suggesting tests and making diagnoses for a medical diagnosis system. Includes areas of robot actuation, natural language generation, and speech synthesis