Improving generalization in psychology will require more expansive data collection to fuel more expansive statistical models, beyond the scale of traditional lab research. We argue that citizen science is uniquely positioned to scale up data collection and, that in spite of certain limitations, can help to alleviate the generalizability crisis.

To be true of every experience, the axioms of Integrated information theory (IIT) are necessarily basic properties and should not be “over-psychologized.” Information, for example, merely asserts that experience is specific, not generic. It does not require “access.” The information a system specifies about itself in its current state is revealed by its unfolded cause–effect structure and quantified by its integrated information.

Sound comparative psychology and modern evolutionary and developmental biology (often called evo-devo) emphasize powerful effects of developmental conditions on the expression of genetic endowment. Both demand that evolutionary theorists recognize these effects. Instead, Tomasello et al. compares studies of normal human children with studies of chimpanzees reared and maintained in cognitively deprived conditions, while ignoring studies of chimpanzees in cognitively appropriate environments.

Revonsuo's evolution-based theory places the nightmare as a prototype dream, which fully realizes its biological function. However, individuals who experience both repetitive (PTSD) nightmares and/or lifelong nontraumatic nightmares demonstrate impaired psychological functioning and attenuated information-processing. The importance of reconciling these discrepancies are addressed and ideas for providing stronger empirical tests of the model are presented.

[Revonsuo]

May provides a compelling case that reasoning is central to moral psychology. In practice, many morally significant decisions involve several moral agents whose actions are interdependent – and agents embedded in society. We suggest that social life and the rich patterns of reasoning that underpin it are ethical through and through.

Motivation and emotion are not clearly defined and differentiated in Rolls's The brain and emotion, reflecting a widespread problem in conceptualizing these phenomena. An adequate theory of emotion cannot be based upon reward and punishment alone. Basic mechanisms of arousal, agonistic, and prosocial motives-emotions exist in addition to reward-punishment systems.

We have argued that the neurocognitive representation of large-scale, navigable three-dimensional space is anisotropic, having different properties in vertical versus horizontal dimensions. Three broad categories organize the experimental and theoretical issues raised by the commentators: (1) frames of reference, (2) comparative cognition, and (3) the role of experience. These categories contain the core of a research program to show how three-dimensional space is represented and used by humans and other animals.

Human reasoning is richer than Lake et al. acknowledge, and the emphasis on theories of how images and scenes are synthesized is misleading. For example, the world knowledge used in vision presumably involves a combination of geometric, physical, and other knowledge, rather than just a causal theory of how the image was produced. In physical reasoning, a model can be a set of constraints rather than a physics engine. In intuitive psychology, many inferences proceed without detailed causal generative models. How humans reliably perform such inferences, often in the face of radically incomplete information, remains a mystery.

The target article asserts that resilience results from a generalized tendency to appraise stressful circumstances positively. Apparently unbeknownst to the authors, essentially the same idea has been advanced before and studied extensively from a different research perspective. This raises a broader issue: the critical need, when projects attempt to span disciplines, to fully examine work from all relevant backgrounds.

I respond to the Behavioral and Brain Sciences commentaries on my book, Talking to Our Selves: Reflection, Ignorance, and Agency. I defend and amend both the skeptical challenge to morally responsible agency, that is, the book's impetus, and the anti-skeptical theory I develop to address that challenge. Regarding the skeptical challenge, I argue that it must be taken more seriously than some of my sanguine commentators assert, and consider some ways its impact might be blunted, such as by appeal to individual differences and the practical efficacy of human behavior. Regarding my positive theory, I defend the role of values in morally responsible agency against numerous criticisms, and consider various suggestions for elaborating my social, “collaborativist” account of morally responsible agency. In closing, I comment on the appropriate aspirations for theorizing about moral responsibility and agency.

The psychology underlying revenge in an intergroup context is built around a small handful of recurrent interaction types. Analyzing the cost/benefit calculations of each agent's role within these interaction types provides a more precise way to characterize intergroup conflict and revenge. This in turn allows for more precise models of the psychology of intergroup conflict to be proposed and tested.

An important way to become self-deceived, omitted by Mele, is by intentionally ignoring and avoiding the contemplation of evidence one has for an upsetting conclusion, knowing full well that one is giving priority to one's present peace of mind over the search for truth. Such intentional self-deception may be especially hard to observe scientifically.

While child language development theory must explain invariant “success,” foreign language learning theory must explain variation and lack of success. The fundamental difference hypothesis (FDH) outlines such a theory. Epstein et al. ignore the explanatory burden, mischaracterize the FDH, and underestimate the resources of human cognition. The field of second language acquisition is not divided into camps by views on “access” to UG.

The cholinergic system is a good candidate for the role of determining the relative weight given in cortical information processing to new sensory information versus prior knowledge. We discuss the physiological data supporting this, and suggest that this Bayesian perspective can easily be reconciled with the dynamical framework proposed by Behrendt & Young (B&Y).

A scientific claim is a generalization based on a reported statistically significant effect. The reproducibility of that claim is its scientific meaning. Anything not explicitly mentioned in a scientific claim as a limitation of the claim's scope means that it implicitly generalizes over these unmentioned aspects. Hence, so-called “conceptual” replications that differ in these unmentioned aspects from the original study are legitimate, and necessary to test the generalization implied by the original study's claim.

Our target article proposes that a new concept – incentive hope – is necessary in the behavioral sciences to explain animal foraging under harsh environmental conditions. Incentive hope refers to a specific motivational mechanism in the brain – considered only in mammals and birds. But it can also be understood at a functional level, as an adaptive behavioral strategy that contributes to improve survival. Thus, this concept is an attempt to bridge across different research fields such as behavioral psychology, reward neuroscience, and behavioral ecology. Many commentaries suggest that incentive hope even could help understand phenomena beyond these research fields, including food wasting and food sharing, mental energy conservation, diverse psychopathologies, irrational decisions in invertebrates, and some aspects of evolution by means of sexual selection. We are favorable to such extensions because incentive hope denotes an unconscious process capable of working against many forms of adversity; organisms do not need to hope as a subjective feeling, but to behave as if they had this feeling. In our response, we carefully discuss each suggestion and criticism and reiterate the importance of having a theory accounting for motivation under reward uncertainty.