Behaviorism is a dead doctrine that was abandoned for good reason. A major strand of O'Regan & Noë's view turns out to be a type of behaviorism, though of a non-standard sort. However, their view succumbs to some of the usual criticisms of behaviorism.

O'Regan & Noë make plausible that perception involves mastery of sensory-motor dependencies. Their rejection of qualia, however, is less persuasive; as is their view that we see only what we are attending to. At times they seem to oppose “internal representation” in general; I argue that they should in fact only be rejecting crude conceptions of brain picturing.

While applauding the bulk of the account on offer, we question one apparent implication, namely, that every difference in sensorimotor contingencies corresponds to a difference in conscious visual experience.

This commentary makes two rejoinders to O'Regan & Noë. It clarifies the status of visual representations in their account, and argues that their explanation of the (according to them, illusory) appeal of qualia is unsatisfying.

To eliminate the leap of faith required to explain how visual consciousness arises from visual representation, O'Regan & Noë focus on the sensorimotor interaction with the outside world and ban internal representations from their account of vision. We argue that evidence for transsaccadic representations necessitates a central position for an internal, on-line stimulus rendition in any adequate theory of vision.

The authors show that some long-standing confusions and problems can be avoided by thinking of perception in terms of sensorimotor contingencies, a close kin to my heterophenomenological approach (Dennett 1991). However, their claim that subjects do not have any commitments about the resolution of their visual fields is belied by the surprise routinely expressed by subjects when this is demonstrated to them.

Two visual phenomena are described in which oculomotor activity (saccades) changes our conscious perception: (1) some geometrical visual illusions disappear when saccades are suppressed, and (2) misperceptions occur in an antisaccade task with attentional precues. The first phenomenon shows that what we consciously perceive depends on how we look. The second phenomena indicates that a saccade itself may remain unconscious together with the accompanying changes of the retinal image.

Positing the importance of sensorimotor contingencies for perception is by no means denying the presence and importance of representations. Using the evidence of mirror neurons we will show the intrinsic relationship between action control and representation within the logic of forward models.

O'Regan & Noë mistakenly identify visual processing with visual experience. I outline some reasons why this is a mistake, taking my data and arguments mainly from the literature on subliminal processing.

O'Regan & Noë run into some difficulty in trying to reconcile their “seeing as acting” proposal with the perception and action account of the functions of the two streams of visual projections in the primate cerebral cortex. I suggest that part of the problem is their reluctance to acknowledge that the mechanisms in the ventral stream may play a more critical role in visual awareness and qualia than mechanisms in the dorsal stream.

The theoretical proposal that perceptual experience be thought of as expectancies about sensorimotor contingencies, rather than as expressions of mental representations, is endorsed; examples that effectively enforce that view are discussed; and one example (of perceptual coupling) that seems to demand a mental representation, with all of the diagnostic value such a tool would have, is raised for consideration.

The theory presented here is a near neighbour of Humphrey's theory of sensations as actions. O'Regan & Noë have opened up remarkable new possibilities. But they have missed a trick by not making more of the distinction between sensation and perception; and some of their particular proposals for how we use our eyes to represent visual properties are not only implausible but would, if true, isolate vision from other sensory modalities and do little to explain the phenomenology of conscious experience in general.

O'Regan & Noë (O&N) argue that there is no need of internal, more or less picture-like, representation of the visual world in the brain. They propose a new approach in which vision is a mode of exploration of the world that is mediated by knowledge of sensorimotor contingencies. Data obtained in “change blindness” experiments support this assumption.

For Gibson, sensory stimulation is neither the cause nor a component of perception, but merely incidental. Perception is based on the pickup of information, which occurs when purposeful observers actively seek information. I present a case in which only with the active sampling of the ambient optical flow field can observers extract the requisite information for the control of locomotion.

The sensorimotor theory of vision successfully blends in with the currently developing action-oriented account of cognition. As a theory of phenomenal consciousness, however, it suffers from the same shortcomings as the theories O'Regan & Noë (O&N) criticize. This is mainly due to the failure to avoid the explanatory gap by rejecting one notion of qualia while retaining the concept of experience with qualitative features in general.

We review studies that indicate a dissociation between the perceptual estimate and the resulting cognitive representation of given properties of a seen object, on the one hand, and the motor action exerted on the same object. We propose that there exist multiple levels of organization of sensorimotor loops and that internal models may be made accessible to one level of organization while remaining inaccessible to another level.

An experimenter studies “sensorimotor contingencies”; the stimulus is primary and the subject's response consequential. But the subject, looking at the world from his or her distinctive viewpoint, is occupied with “motorsensory contingencies”; the response is now primary and the sensory consequential. These two categories are gathered together under the one term in the target article. This commentary disambiguates the confusion.

In O'Regan & Noë's (O&N's) account for the phenomenal experience of seeing, awareness is equated to what is within the current focus of attention. They find no place for a distinction between phenomenal and access awareness. In doing so, they essentially present a dualistic solution to the mind-brain problem, and ignore that we do have phenomenal experience of what is outside the focus of attention.

Sensory motor contingencies belong to a functionalistic framework. Functionalism does not explain why and how objective functional relations produce phenomenal experience. O'Regan & Noë (O&N) as well as other functionalists do not propose a new ontology that could support the first person subjective phenomenal side of experience.

Sensorimotor contingencies are certainly of great importance for perception but they are no substitute for the internal representation of perceived information. I argue that internal, non-iconic representations of perceptions must, and do, exist and that sensorimotor contingencies are an integral part of them. Further, I argue that mastery of the sensory apparatus or environment is not a prerequisite for perception and that perception is possible in the absence of any control over the perceptual process.