It was a pleasure to read Zwaan et al.'s wise and balanced target article. Here, I use it as a shining example for bolstering the argument that to make innovations such as replication mainstream, it seems advisable to move the debates from social media to respected “mainstream” psychology journals. Only then will mainstream psychologists be reached and, we hope, convinced.

Although the model proposed by Thelen and co-authors provides a detailed explanation for the processes underlying reaching, many aspects of it are highly speculative. One of the reasons for this is our lack of knowledge about transformation of a hand movement plan into joint movements. The leading joint hypothesis (LJH) allows us to partially fill in this gap. The LJH offers a possible explanation for the formation of movement and how it may be represented in memory. Our explanation converges with the dynamic model described in the target article.

I outline key empirical evidence from my research and that of other scholars, testing the role of cultural group selection (CGS) in the evolution of human cooperation, which Richerson et al. failed to mention and which fails to support the CGS hypothesis.

We question whether altruistic motivation links identity fusion and extreme self-sacrifice. We review two lines of research suggesting that the underlying motivation is plausibly egoistic.

Heyes sets out an intriguing theory but it raises more questions than compelling answers concerning culturally shaped cognition. I set out what I see as the most pressing questions, ranging over the book's early chapters concerning the structure of the theory, to two of Heyes’ four exemplar cognitive domains, selective social learning and imitation.

Emotional events can either impair or enhance memory for immediately preceding items. The GANE model explains this bidirectional effect as a glutamate “priority” signal that modulates noradrenaline release depending on arousal state. We argue for an alternative explanation: that priority itself evokes phasic noradrenaline release. Thus, contrasting E-1 memory effects are explained by a mechanism based on the Bienenstock–Cooper–Munro theory.

In order to evaluate the impact of contemporary grandparenting, the view should not be restricted to developmental achievement effects in grandchildren. Both child happiness and grandparent happiness are high-ranking goals with implications for public policy. The beneficial impact of grandparenting for risk families appears unequivocal, and modern life still encounters all kinds of unpredictable risks. Contemporary grandparental care is no evolutionary mismatch.

Knobe argues that people's judgments of the moral status of a side-effect of action influence their assessment of whether the side-effect is intentional. I tested this hypothesis using vignettes akin to Knobe's but involving economically or eudaimonistically (wellness-related) negative side-effects. My results show that it is people's sense of what agents deserve, and not the moral status of side-effects, that drives intuition.

Representing objects and concepts as points in low-dimensional shape space defined by distances to other complete object exemplars or prototypes, expressed as single numbers, misses the key advantages of representation in terms of hierarchically constructed, meaningful features of the environment. Generalisation along statistically significant, near-independent, sparse, cooperative features that stand directly for various aspects of a concept is essential.

Should we distinguish between access and phenomenal consciousness? Block says yes and that various pathologies of consciousness support and clarify the distinction. The commentary charge that the distinction is neither supported nor clarified by the clinical data. It recommends an alternative reading of the data and urges Block to clarify the distinction.