According to the foundations of economic theory, agents have stable and coherent “global” preferences that guide their choices among alternatives. However, people are constrained by information-processing and memory limitations and hence have a propensity to avoid cognitive load. We propose that this in turn will encourage them to respond to “local” preferences and goals influenced by context and memory representations.

Three related issues are addressed. First, Hurley treats emulation and imitation as a straightforward dichotomy with emulation emerging first. Recent conceptual analyses and “ghost” chimpanzee experiments challenge this. Second, other recent chimpanzee experiments reveal high-fidelity social transmission, questioning whether copying fidelity is the brake on cumulative culture. Finally, other cognitive processes such as pretence need to be integrated.

Kline argues for an expanded taxonomy of teaching focusing on the adaptive behaviors needed to solve learning problems. Absent from her analysis is an explicit definition of learning, or a discussion of the iterative nature of the relationship between teaching and learning. Including the learner in the discussion may help to distinguish among the adaptive values of different teaching behaviors.

Carruthers offers a promising model for how “we” know the propositional contents of “our” own minds. Unfortunately, in retaining talk of first-person access to mental states, his suggestions assume that a higher-order self is already “in the loop.” We invite Carruthers to eliminate the first-person from his model and to develop a more thoroughly third-person model of metacognition.

Vaesen disregards a plausible alternative to his position, and so fails to offer a compelling argument for unique cognitive mechanisms. We suggest an ecological alternative, according to which divergent relationships between organism and environment, not exotic neuroanatomy, are responsible for unique cognitive capacities. This approach is pertinent to claims about primate cognition; and on this basis, we argue that Vaesen's inference from unique skills to unique mechanisms is unwarranted.

We propose that early in ontogeny, children's core cognitive abilities are shaped by culturally dependent “software updates.” The role of sociocultural inputs in the development of children's learning is largely missing from Lake et al.'s discussion of the development of human-like artificial intelligence, but its inclusion would help move research even closer to machines that can learn and think like humans.

Research practice is too often shaped by routines rather than reflection. The routine of sampling subjects, but not stimuli, is a case in point, leading to unwarranted generalizations. It likely originated out of administrative rather than scientific concerns. The routine of sampling subjects and testing their averages for significance is reinforced by delusions about its meaningfulness, including the replicability delusion.

McCullough et al.'s target article is a psychological version of the reputation models pioneered by biologist Robert Trivers (1971) and economist Robert Frank (1988). The authors, like Trivers and Frank, offer an implausible explanation of the fact that revenge is common even when there are no possible reputational effects. I sketch a more plausible model based on recent research.

We show that externalization is a feature not only of moral judgment, but also of value judgment in general. It follows that the evolution of externalization was not specific to moral judgment. Second, we argue that value judgments cannot be decoupled from the level of motivations and preferences, which, in the moral case, rely on intersubjective bonds and claims.

Here, we specifically discuss why and to what extent we agree with Burkart et al. about the coexistence of general intelligence and modular cognitive adaptations, and why we believe that the distinction between primary and secondary modules they propose is indeed essential.

Autism has been described as a neural deficit in prediction, people with autism manifest low perceptual construal and are impaired at traversing psychological distances, and Gilead et al.'s hierarchy from iconic to multimodal to fully abstract, socially communicated representations is exactly the hierarchy of representational impairment in autism, making autism a natural behavioural and neurophysiological test case for the prediction–abstraction relationship.

Deliberate practice and experience may suffice as predictors of expertise, but they cannot account for spectacular achievements. Highly variable environmental and biological factors provide facilitating as well as constraining conditions for development, generating relative plasticity rather than absolute plasticity. The skills of virtuosos and idiots savants are more consistent with the talent account than with the deliberate-practice account.

We distinguish the question whether only human minds are equipped with a language of thought (LoT) from the question whether human minds employ a single uniquely human learning mechanism. Thus separated, our answer to both questions is negative. Even very simple minds employ a LoT. And the comparative data reviewed by Penn et al. actually suggest that there are many distinctively human learning mechanisms.

We propose that an underestimated albeit fundamental mechanism in teaching behavior is perceptual resonance. With this mechanism, many animals, including humans, are able to learn from each other by sharing and processing relevant events in the environment. For teaching, we suggest a triadic principle involving the teacher, the learner, and the events to be learned from the world.

Across taxonomic subfamilies, variations in intelligence (G) are sometimes related to brain size. However, within species, brain size plays a smaller role in explaining variations in general intelligence (g), and the cause-and-effect relationship may be opposite to what appears intuitive. Instead, individual differences in intelligence may reflect variations in domain-general processes that are only superficially related to brain size.

Continuing commentary raised several issues concerning our proposal that the hippocampus, parahippocampal region, and cortical association areas mediate different aspects of memory function. Recent relevant findings strengthen our argument that neocortical areas and the parahippocampal region maintain persistent encodings of specific single items and that the hippocampus mediates representations of the relations among these items. The reciprocally and closely interconnected structures that compose the hippocampal memory system work interactively to support flexible memory expression that is relevant to the natural behavior of animals and to conscious recollection in humans.

The prevailing view that there is significant cognitive continuity between humans and other animals is a result of misinterpretations of the role of evolution, combined with anthropomorphism. This combination has often resulted in an over-interpretation of data from animal experiments. Comparative psychology should do what the name indicates: study the cognitive capacities of different species empirically, without naive evolutionary presuppositions.