Victor Lamme

Victor Lamme, of the University of Amsterdam, is the author of Recurrent Processing Theory (RPT), one of the five theories from which the field’s AI consciousness indicators are drawn. RPT holds that a percept becomes conscious when activity in the visual system settles into local recurrent loops, feedback exchanges between areas that stabilize a representation, and that the additional machinery of global broadcast and reportability is a later, separate process. The theory’s sharpest claim is that reportability is a poor guide to experience, because what gets reported has passed through access machinery that experience itself does not require. This site tracks the theory’s role in the assessment framework in the nineteen researcher checklist, where RPT’s indicators, algorithmic recurrence and integrated perceptual representations, are the first on the list.

Lamme’s position matters for AI assessment because it changes what to look for. A system could, on RPT, have experience-relevant organization that never reaches a report channel, which means behavioral silence is not evidence of absence. The dispute between Lamme’s local recurrence and the global workspace account remains one of the field’s live fault lines, and the adversarial testing programs descend from exactly this kind of disagreement.

Known for. Recurrent Processing Theory, local recurrences versus global broadcast, the argument that reportability misses experience, neuroscience of visual awareness

Coverage on this site

• What Would AI Consciousness Actually Look Like? The 14-Indicator Checklist Explained March 2026

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Victor Lamme is listed with the other functionalists and computationalists, who hold that what matters is the organisation of the processing, not the material. The theory family behind that position is set out in the index of consciousness theories. Every researcher covered on this site is indexed in the directory of consciousness researchers.