Boyer & Lienard's (B&L's) explanation of ritualized behavior is plausible because it fits so well with elementary facts about evolution of plasticity in our behavioral repertoire. Its scope, however, may be broader than its authors explicitly admit. Science itself may be illuminated as ritual behavior. Science, like other rituals, can sustain both healthy and pathological forms.

Research on the representation of generic knowledge suggests that inherent properties can have either a principled or a causal connection to a kind. The type of connection determines whether the outcome of the storytelling process will include intuitions of inevitability and a normative dimension and whether it will ground causal explanations.

Christiansen & Chater (C&C) have taken the interactionist approach to linguistic universals to an extreme, adopting the metaphor of language as an organism. This metaphor adds no insights to five decades of analyzing language universals as the result of interaction of linguistically unique and general cognitive systems. This metaphor is also based on an outmoded view of classical Darwinian evolution and has no clear basis in biology or cognition.

Tenenbaum and Griffiths' paper attempts to subsume theories of similarity – including spatial models, featural models, and structure-mapping models – into a framework based on Bayesian generalization. But in so doing it misses significant phenomena of comparison. It would be more fruitful to examine how comparison processes suggest hypotheses than to try to derive similarity from Bayesian reasoning. [Shepard; Tenenbaum & Griffiths]

sunstein represents moral heuristics as rigid rules that lead us to jump to moral conclusions, and contrasts them with reflective moral deliberation, which he represents as independent of heuristics and capable of supplanting them. following john dewey's psychology of moral judgment, i argue that successful moral deliberation does not supplant moral heuristics but uses them flexibly as inputs to deliberation. many of the flaws in moral judgment that sunstein attributes to heuristics reflect instead the limitations of the deliberative context in which people are asked to render judgments.

The target articles on sleep and dreaming are discussed in terms of the concept of search activity integrating different types of behavior, body resistance, REM sleep/dream functions, and the brain catecholamine system. REM sleep may be functionally sufficient or insufficient, depending on the dream scenario, the latter being more important than the physiological manifestation of REM sleep. REM sleep contributes to memory consolidation in the indirect way.

[Nielsen; Revonsuo; Solms; Vertes & Eastman]

Phillips & Singer (P&S) extend ideas derived from the observation eight years ago that the coherence (synchronization) of cortical oscillations can be modulated by the structure of visual stimuli. As described in the target article, a large part of the continued interest in this finding is related to independent theoretical work suggesting that synchronized cell firing could help solve the problem of binding together within cortex neuronal activity associated with different attributes of visual stimuli. The authors present an abstract “proof of concept” model describing how their cortical processing scheme could work, but our biologically realistic models of cortical relationships suggest that the proposal is biologically implausible. Our realistic models lead to a very different interpretation of the significance of cortical oscillations.

Manipulations that draw attention to extensional or set-based considerations are neither sufficient nor necessary for enhanced use of base rates in intuitive judgments. Frequency formats are only one part of the puzzle of base-rate use and neglect. The conditions under which these and other manipulations promote base-rate use may be more parsimoniously organized under the broader notion of case-based judgment.

Clahsen's view on language is intimately linked with the Chomskian distinction between competence and performance. He uses performance to verify theoretical assumptions about the underlying structure of competence. Using mostly off-line tasks, he may fail to answer the question of how language is generated and perceived in natural situations.

Two notions of autonomy are distinguished. The respective denials that psychology is autonomous from neurobiology are neuron doctrines, moderate and radical. According to the moderate neuron doctrine, interdisciplinary interaction need not aim at reduction. It is proposed that it is more plausible that there is slippage from the moderate to the radical neuron doctrine than that there is confusion between the radical neuron doctrine and the trivial version.

We argue that the authors ignore a broad range of possible means of changing behaviour: unintentional change. Most of the behaviours that people seek to change – either in themselves or that are the subject of public health campaigns–are habitual, and hence not necessarily responsive to intentions. An evolutionary approach should take into account all kinds of evolved behavioural responses.

To support the claim that the approximate number system (ANS) represents rational numbers, Clarke and Beck (C&B) argue that number perception is abstract and characterized by a second-order character. However, converging evidence from visual illusions and psychophysics suggests that perceived number is not abstract, but rather, is perceptually interdependent with other magnitudes. Moreover, number, as a concept, is second-order, but number, as a percept, is not.

A parieto-frontal integration theory (P-FIT) model of human intelligence has been proposed based on a review of neuroimaging literature and lesion studies. The P-FIT model provides an important basis for future research. Future studies involving connectivity analyses and an integrative approach of imaging modalities using the P-FIT model should provide vastly increased understanding of the biological bases of intelligence.

The target article presents arguments for a motivational system dedicated exclusively to the detection of, and reaction to, particular threats to fitness, the so-called Hazard-Precaution System, which, according to the authors, drives ritualized behavior. We approach the issue of a motivational system from three perspectivesdevelopmental, psychopathological, and ethnological.