Jagiello and colleagues offer a bifocal stance theory of cultural evolution for understanding how individuals flexibly choose between instrumental and ritual stances in social learning. We argue that the role of culture, developmental age-related differences, and the intersectionality of these and other individual's identities need to be more fully considered in this theoretical framework.

Languages emerge in response to the negotiation of shared meaning in social groups, where transparency of grammar is necessitated by demands of communication with relative strangers needing to consult on a wide range of topics (Ragir 2002). This communal exchange is automated and stabilized through activity-dependent fine-tuning of information-specific neural connections during postnatal growth and social development.

An intertemporal bargaining model of commitment does not entail the interaction of parts within the person as Rachlin claims, and is needed to explain properties of “ordinary” self-control that his molar generalization model does not predict.

successful application of heuristics depends on how a problem is represented, mentally. moral imagination is a good technique for reflecting on, and sharing, mental representations of ethical dilemmas, including those involving emerging technologies. future research on moral heuristics should use more ecologically valid problems and combine quantitative and qualitative methods.

The function of memory is to allow past experience to subserve present goal-oriented thought and action. The defining characteristic of goal-oriented approach/avoidance is value. Value lies beyond the reproductive conception of memory that is basic to both metaphors discussed in Koriat & Goldsmith's target article. Functional memory requires a quite different metaphor, for which a grounded theory is available.

Krueger & Funder (K&F) spend too much time on their critique of some classic studies in social psychology. They should have spent more time developing their constructive ideas about better methodologies and, especially, better conceptual foundations for the field. We endorse their exhortation to consider social behavior in its ecologically adaptive context, and we present a few ideas of our own about how to develop a more comprehensive conceptual framework.

Block's notion of P-consciousness catches too much in its net. He would do better to exclude all states that do not have a sensory component. I question what he says about my work with the “blind” monkey, Helen.

Health messages designed to address obesity are typically focused on the long-term benefits of eating healthy food. However, according to the insurance hypothesis, obese people are food insecure, and this causes them to be overly concerned about short-term consumption. As such, it is necessary to rethink public health messaging and consider how to reduce short-term insecurity by eating healthy food.

The approach of Hobson et al. is limited to the description of global states of consciousness, although more detailed analyses of the specific contents of consciousness would also be required. Furthermore, their account of the mind-brain relationship remains obscure. Nielsen's discussion suffers from conceptual and definitional unclarity. Mentation during sleep could be clarified by reconceptualizing it as an issue about the contents of consciousness. Vertes & Eastman do not consider the types of memory (emotional) and learning (implicit) that are relevant during REM sleep, and therefore dismiss on inadequate grounds the possibility of memory functions associated with REM sleep.

[Hobson et al.; Nielsen; Vertes & Eastman]

The debate on cumulative technological culture (CTC) is dominated by social-learning discussions, at the expense of other cognitive processes, leading to flawed circular arguments. I welcome the authors' approach to decouple CTC from social-learning processes without minimizing their impact. Yet, this model will only be informative to understand the evolution of CTC if tested in other cultural species.

Three issues are addressed in this commentary. (1) Wilkins & Wakefield are commended for placing the complex behavior they discuss within an evolutionary matrix. (2) They err on a number of points in regard to their treatment of this complex behavior. These involve (a) their emphasis on the evolution of conceptual structure rather than language, (b) their equation of meaning with reference, (c) their minimalist view of learning theory, and (d) their separation of the evolution of speech from that of language. (3) They adopt a framework for neural preconditions that has been clearly discredited on both behavioral and neuroanatomical grounds. Finally, recent research involving modern neuroimaging techniques casts further doubt on the authors' postulated functions for the neural areas they discuss.

That Haig and Sohn find the hypothetico-deductive approach wanting in different ways shows that multiple conditional syllogisms are being used in different stages of theory corroboration in the Popperian approach. The issues raised in the two commentaries assume a different complexion when certain distinctions are made.

Clarke and Beck (C&B) discuss in their sections on congruency and confounds (sects. 3 and 4) literature that has challenged the claim that the approximate number system (ANS) represents numerical content. We argue that the propositions put forward by these studies aren't that far from the indirect model of number perception suggested by C&B.