Self-sufficient ideographies are rare because they are stifled by the issue of standardization. Similar issues arise with abstract art or drawings created by young children or great apes. We propose that mathematical indices and artificial intelligence can help us decode ideography, and if not to understand its meaning, at least to know that meaning exists.

We review studies on catching that reveal internalization of physics for action control. In catching free-falling balls, an internal model of gravity is used by the brain to time anticipatory muscle activation, modulation of reflex responses, and tuning of limb impedance. An internal model of the expected momentum of the ball at impact is used to scale the amplitude of anticipatory muscle activity. [Barlow; Hecht; Shepard]

Anecdotal evidence suggests that people with autism, with known impairments in mechanisms supporting a folk psychology of mind or souls, can hold a belief in an afterlife. We focus on the role language plays, not just in acquiring the specific content of beliefs, but more significantly, in the acquisition of the concept of life after death for all people.

Carruthers presents evidence concerning the cross-modular integration of information in human subjects which appears to support the “cognitive conception of language.” According to this conception, language is not just a means of communication, but also a representational medium of thought. However, Carruthers overlooks the possibility that language, in both its communicative and cognitive roles, is a nonrepresentational system of conventional signals – that words are not a medium we think in, but a tool we think with. The evidence he cites is equivocal when it comes to choosing between the cognitive conception and this radical communicative conception of language.

Jaswal & Akhtar in their target article convincingly argue that subjects with autism do not have diminished social motivation. However, they still recognize that autistic people behave socially in an unusual way. Why? Here we suggest that these behaviours are the results of a multisensory integration deficit. Viewed from this perspective, the assumption that autistic people's unusual behaviours indicate diminished social motivation has to be replaced by the one that they have diminished social prediction skills.

The target article advanced the null, unified and widely misinterpreted generative hypothesis regarding second language (L2) acquisition. Postulating that UG (Universal Grammar) constrains L2 knowledge growth does not entail identical developmental trajectories for L2 and first language (LI) acquisition; nor does it preclude a role for the L1. In embracing this hypothesis, we maintain a distinction between competence and performance. Those who conflate the two repeat fundamental and by no means unprecedented misconstruals of the generative enterprise, and more specifically, of the empirical content of the null hypothesis regarding L2 linguistic knowledge growth. We hope to have identified certain common goals, the adoption of which might constitute a firm foundation for continued productive interdisciplinary development of contemporary theoretical and experimental L2 acquisition research.

We propose that measures of information integration can be more straightforwardly interpreted as measures of agency rather than of consciousness. This may be useful to the goals of consciousness research, given how agency and consciousness are “duals” in many (although not all) respects.

We endorse Stanford's project, which calls attention to features of human psychology that exhibit a “puzzling combination of objective and subjective elements,” and that are central to cooperation. However, we disagree with his delineation of the explanatory target. What he calls “externalization or objectification” conflates two separate properties, neither of which can serve as the mark of the moral.

Mealey's sociopathy model is an exemplar of popular diathesis-stress models. Although such models, when presented in descriptive language, offer the illusion of integrative explanation, their actual scientific value is very limited because they fail to make specific, quantitative, falsifiable predictions. Conceptual and quantitative weaknesses of such diathesis-stress models are discussed and the requirements for useful models are outlined.

Goldin-Meadow & Brentari (G-M&B) argue that, for sign language users, gesture – in contrast to linguistic sign – is iconic, highly variable, and similar to spoken language co-speech gesture. We discuss two examples (telicity and absolute gradable adjectives) that challenge the use of these criteria for distinguishing sign from gesture.

Many systems neuroscientists want to understand neurons in terms of mediation; we want to understand how neurons are involved in the causal chain from stimulus to behavior. Unfortunately, most tools are inappropriate for that while our language takes mediation for granted. Here we discuss the contrast between our conceptual drive toward mediation and the difficulty of obtaining meaningful evidence.

The attempt to derive mental function from brain structure is highly constrained by study of the allometric changes among brain components with evolution. In particular, even if homologous structures in different species produce similar computations, they may be constituents of larger systems (e.g., cortical-subcortical loops) that exhibit different composite operations as a function of relative size and connectivity in different-sized brains. The resulting evolutionary constraints set useful and specific conditions on candidate hypotheses of brain circuit computation.

My criticisms of parapsychology are neither based on its subject matter per se, nor simply on a charge of sloppy research, but rather on the whole pattern of theory and research in this domain. The lack of a positive definition of psi, the use of ad hoc principles such as psi-missing and the experimenter psi effect to account for failures to confirm hypotheses, and the failure to produce a single phenomenon that can be replicated by neutral investigators are among the major problems that keep parapsychology outside regular science. Glicksohn and I agree that anomalous experiences should be investigated.

Burkart et al.'s impressive synthesis will serve as a valuable resource for intelligence research. Despite its strengths, the target article falls short of offering compelling explanations for the evolution of intelligence. Here, we outline its shortcomings, illustrate how these can lead to misguided conclusions about the evolution of intelligence, and suggest ways to address the article's key questions.

We agree with Jones & Love (J&L) that much of Bayesian modeling has taken a fundamentalist approach to cognition; but we do not believe in the potential of Bayesianism to provide insights into psychological processes. We discuss the advantages of associative explanations over Bayesian approaches to causal induction, and argue that Bayesian models have added little to our understanding of human causal reasoning.