There must be innate conceptual machinery, but perhaps not as much as Carey proposes. A single mechanism of Perceptual Meaning Analysis that simplifies spatiotemporal information into a small number of conceptual primitives may suffice. This approach avoids the complexities and ambiguities of interactions between separate dedicated analyzers and central concepts that Carey posits, giving learning a somewhat larger role in early concept formation.

Research on the neural correlates of sexual arousal is a growing field of research in affective neuroscience. A new approach studying the correlation between the hemodynamic cerebral response and autonomic genital response has enabled distinct brain areas to be identified according to their role in inducing penile erection, on the one hand, and in representing penile sensation, on the other.

Chow's endorsement of a limited role for null hypothesis significance testing is a needed corrective of research malpractice, but his decision to place this procedure in a hypothetico-deductive framework of Popperian cast is unwise. Various failures of this version of the hypothetico-deductive method have negative implications for Chow's treatment of significance testing, meta-analysis, and theory evaluation.

Studies of testosterone's effect on dominance are confounded by the effects of dominance experiences on testosterone. Furthermore, antisocial behavior tends to originate prepubertally, when testosterone levels are the same for aggressive males, nonaggressive males, and females. It seems more parsimonious to view variation in testosterone as an effect of dominance-related mood states than to invoke a reciprocal model.

The received view in historical linguistics is that there is always an inverse relation between token frequency and likelihood of analogical change. I have found evidence, however, of a sharp difference in frequency effects between regularization and nonregularizing analogical change. I argue that this difference can easily be accounted for by dual-mechanism models of inflection but is very problematic for pure associative-memory models.

Although Carruthers’ proposals avoid some of the more obvious pitfalls that face analysts of the language-cognition relationship, they are needlessly complex and vitiated by his uncritical acceptance of a highly modular variety of evolutionary psychology. He pays insufficient attention both to the neural substrate of the processes he hypothesizes and to the evolutionary developments that gave rise to both language and human cognition.

Depue & Collins propose that extraversion should be separated from the impulsivity-constraint dimension of personality, and that the VTA dopamine system is the primary engine of extraversion. Although their focus is on personality traits, it may be useful to consider the evidence on psychological state changes, related both to affective arousal and to drug effects. This evidence shows that there are inherent relations between extraversion and impulsivity-constraint, and that there are influences of dopamine on impulsivity-constraint that are not consistent with the Depue & Collins model. Increased positive affect leads to increased extraversion, and this is associated with more impulsivity and less constraint. The evidence on drug effects shows that greater dopaminergic control is associated with more constraint, and with anxiety and vigilance rather than positive affect.

Bullot & Reber (B&R) correctly include historical perspectives into the scientific study of art appreciation. But artistic understanding always emerges from embodied simulation processes that incorporate the ongoing dynamics of brains, bodies, and world interactions. There may not be separate modes of artistic understanding, but a continuum of processes that provide imaginative simulations of the artworks we see or hear.

An animal confronts numerous challenges when constructing an optimal navigational route. Spatial representations used for path optimization are likely constrained by critical environmental factors that dictate which neural systems control navigation. Multiple coding schemes depend upon their ecological relevance for a particular species, particularly when dealing with the third, or vertical, dimension of space.

Although Zwaan et al. (2018) have made a compelling case as to why direct replications should occur more frequently than they do, they do not address how such replications attempts can best be encouraged. We propose a novel method for incentivising replication attempts and discuss some issues surrounding its implementation.

Skills cannot be divided into the innate and the acquired. Also, genetic effects may not come into play until well after early childhood, and evocative gene-environment correlations are to be expected. Special talents are common in autism and warrant more detailed study, but whether they have the same meaning as talents in nonautistic individuals is not known.