We agree with Kline that a lack of unification is preventing progress in understanding the occurrence of teaching behaviour and the selective pressures influencing its presence. However, we feel that the proposed framework, which incorporates mentalistic and cultural approaches, continues to overlook cases of teaching in nonhuman animals. We advocate the comparative functionalist framework to identify the proximate causes of teaching behaviour in both humans and other animals.

Aggleton & Brown predict that recognition and episodic recall depend on different brain systems and can thus be dissociated from one another. However, intact recall with impaired recognition has not yet been demonstrated if the same type of information is used in both tests. Current evidence suggests that processes underlying familiarity-based recognition are redundant with processes underlying episodic memory.

The self-organizing consciousness (SOC) is not sufficient to account for young children's ability to acquire complex rules and word-object mappings. First, the attention-association cycles suggested by the SOC are unlikely to happen because recurrence of particular stimulus properties usually disengages the attention of an observer. Second, “primitive processors” preinstalled in the system make the SOC unnecessarily complex.

I argue that framing the issue of motivated belief formation and its subsequent social gains in the language of self-deception raises logical difficulties. Two such difficulties are that (1) in trying to provide an evolutionary motive for viewing self-deception as a mechanism to facilitate other-deception, the ease and ubiquity of self-deception are undermined, and (2) because after one has successfully deceived oneself, what one communicates to others, though untrue, is not deceptive, we cannot say that self-deception evolved in order to facilitate the deception of others.

Although our idea of sequential input being a key to cerebellar function was taken seriously by most commentators, there were also objections, based in part on experimental evidence that seems to contradict our intuitions and in part on commentators' preferences for different schemes. Several were suspicious of experiments (performed on slices of cerebellar tissue) that may have severed some of the synaptic connections, particularly the inhibitory ones. It is our feeling that a modi- fication of our theory that could satisfy most critics would not have to be very radical.

The Findlay-Walker model does not consider saccades generated by auditory targets or nontargets (distractors), or by bimodal stimulation. Empirical results suggest that the effects of auditory stimulation cannot easily be incorporated into the model, neither in the WHEN nor in the WHERE system. A two-stage model by Colonius and Arndt gives a quantitative account of the facilitative effects of auditory distractors on saccadic latencies toward visual targets.

Although endorsing the authors’ concentration on the issue of abstraction, I critique (a) the philosophical nature of their abstract–concrete dimension, (b) their view of the brain–world barrier, and (c) their implicit positivist one-way hierarchy that has abstraction as the goal.

We studied patients with left visual extinction following right hemisphere damage in a simple manual reaction time task using brief visual stimuli. With unilateral lateralized stimuli the patients showed a high proportion of unwanted, reflex-like saccades to either side of stimulation. In contrast, with bilateral stimuli there was an overall decrease in the proportion of unwanted saccades, and the vast majority of them were directed toward the ipsilesional side. The implications of these results for the Findlay & Walker model are discussed.

Keven & Akins' (K&A's) compelling new hypothesis explaining the developmental and neural basis of neonatal tongue protrusion has important implications for current understanding of primate imitation and the explanatory value of mirror neurons. If correct, this hypothesis eliminates a major source of evidence for neonatal imitation. I explore the implications this has for mirror neuron research and the arguments building upon them.

Andrews et al. present a clear discussion of the various criteria needed to identify adaptations. However, they also imply a history of the debate between adaptationists and their critics that is incomplete. The history implied is one of only genuine scientific disagreement. This neglects the role of nonscientific motives and strawman arguments on behalf of the critics of adaptationists.