What makes conscious experiences necessary for in- formation processing or behaviour (no one knows)? Would it be easier first to divide consciousness into different levels (probably not)? Is consciousness tied to information processing or brain states (no one knows)? Would the target article's comparator be improved by adding a continuously adjusting feedback (probably not)?

Koehler's summary and critique of research on the base rate fallacy is cogent and persuasive. However, he may have overstated the case, and his suggestions for future research may be too restrictive. We agree that methodological approaches to this topic should be broadened, but we argue that experimental laboratory research and the Bayesian normative standard are useful and should not be abandoned.

Bering makes a good case for turning attention to an organized system that provides the self with transcendental meaning. In focusing on the evolutionary basis of this system, however, he overlooks the self-organizing properties of cognitive systems themselves. We propose that the illusory system Bering describes can be more generally and parsimoniously viewed as an emergent by-product of self-organization, with no need for specialized “illusion by design.”

Although the suboptimality of perceptual decision making is indisputable in its strictest sense, characterizing the nature of suboptimalities constitutes a valuable drive for future research. I argue that decision consistency offers a rarely measured, yet important behavioral metric for decomposing suboptimality (or, more generally, deviations from any candidate model of decision making) into ultimately predictable and inherently unpredictable components.

We comment on the similarities and differences of Mitchell et al.'s framework for understanding classical and operant conditioning and the theoretical framework put forth by Rumbaugh et al. (2007). We propose that all nonhuman and human learning may be based on amalgams created by co-occurring stimuli that share their response-eliciting properties and that these amalgams may be propositional in nature.

We argue that the Rules-Similarity continuum is only a useful formalism for particular, isolated tasks and must rest on the assumption that representations formed during a particular task are independent of other tasks. We show this to be an unrealistic conjecture. We additionally point out that describing categorization as selective weighing and abstracting of features misses the important step of discovering what the possible features are.

Low-level consciousness is fundamental to our understanding of the world. Within the conscious field, the constantly changing external visual information is transformed into stable, object-based percepts. Remarkably, holistic objects are perceived while we are cognizant of all of the spatial details comprising the objects and of the relationship between individual elements. This parallel conscious association is unique to the brain. Conscious contributions to motor activity come after our understanding of the world has been established.

Our sense of obligation is evident outside of joint collaborative activities. Most notably, children and adults recognize that parents are obligated to care for and love their children. This is presumably not because we think parents view their children as worthy cooperative partners, but because special obligations and duties are inherent in certain relational dynamics, namely the parent-child relationship.

The novel correspondence metaphor outlined by Koriat & Goldsmith offers important advantages for studying critical issues of memory-accuracy. It also fits well with the current emphasis on the reconstructive nature of memory and on the role of cognitive, metacognitive, and motivational factors in memory performance. These positive features notwithstanding, the storehouse/correspondence framework faces potential perils having to do with its implied linkage to the laboratory/real-life controversy and its proposal of studying correspondence issues in isolation from memory phenomena captured by the storehouse paradigm.

People become addicted in different ways, and they respond differently to different interventions. There may nevertheless be a core neural pathology responsible for all distinctively addictive suboptimal behavioral habits. In particular, timing models of reward learning suggest a hypothesis according to which all addiction involves neuroadaptation that attenuates serotonergic inhibition of a mesolimbic dopamine system that has learned that cues for consumption of the addictive target are signals of a high-reward-rate environment.