Consciousness, Action, PAM!

Milner and Goodale’s perception-action model (PAM) is a common ground for recent philosophical discussions of the role of visual consciousness in control of action. In this talk, I briefly introduce the current discussions and argue that PAM is ambiguous between a strong and weak version. The strong version posits separate and independent computational mechanisms and representations for visual cognition and visually guided motor action, whereas the weak version posits a common mechanism and representation for both cognition and action. I argue that available evidence is unable to distinguish between the versions. This issue not only has important consequences for philosophical theories of the cognitive role of visual consciousness, it also has implications for the role of experimental evidence in model testing in cognitive neuroscience.