The 25th Bartlett Lecture: To Act or Not to Act: Perspectives on the Representation of Actions

In this review, a description is offered of the way actions are represented, how these representations are built, and how their content can be accessed by the agent and by other agents. Such a description will appear critical for understanding how an action is attributed to its proper origin, or, in other words, how a subject can make a conscious judgement about who the agent of that action is (an agency judgement). This question is central to the problem of self-consciousness: Action is one of the main channels used for communication between individuals, so that determining the agent of an action contributes to differentiating the self from others.