  We investigate the relationship between the emergence of chaos
synchronization and the information flow in dynamical systems possessing
homogeneous or heterogeneous global interactions whose origin can be external
(driven systems) or internal (autonomous systems). By employing general models
of coupled chaotic maps for such systems, we show that the presence of a
homogeneous global field, either external or internal, for all times is not
indispensable for achieving complete or generalized synchronization in a system
of chaotic elements. Complete synchronization can also appear with
heterogeneous global fields; it does not requires the simultaneous sharing of
the field by all the elements in a system. We use the normalized mutual
information and the information transfer between global and local variables to
characterize complete and generalized synchronization. We show that these
information measures can characterize both types of synchronized states and
also allow to discern the origin of a global interaction field. A
synchronization state emerges when a sufficient amount of information provided
by a field is shared by all the elements in the system, on the average over
long times. Thus, the maximum value of the top-down information transfer can be
used as a predictor of synchronization in a system, as a parameter is varied.
