Evidence accumulates that pre- and postnatally circulating estrogens play an active role in the differentiation of the female brain: the susceptible period for feminization of the brain seems to extend far beyond the period during which masculinization of the brain occurs. Thus, there is a need to reevaluate the widely accepted “concept of basic femaleness” in sexual brain differentiation.

The authors O'Regan & Noë (O&N) have ignored the case for the visual field as being non-epistemic evidence internal to the brain, having no pictorial similarity to the external input, and being material in ontological status. They are also not aware of the case for the evolutionary advantage of learning as the perceptual refashioning of such non-epistemic sensory evidence via motivated feedback in sensorimotor activity.

Twenty-six commentators from several disciplines have written on the assumption that choice is determined by comparative valuation in a common denominator of reward, the “competitive marketplace.” There was no apparent disagreement that prospective rewards are discounted hyperbolically, although some found that the resulting predictions could come just as well from other models, including the interpretation of delay as risk and analysis in terms of hot versus cold valuation systems. Several novel ideas emerged.

Self-experimentation is uncommon in the decision sciences, but mental experiments are common; for example, intuition and introspection are often used by theoretical economists as justifications for their models. While introspection can be useful for the generation of ideas, it can also be overused and become a comfortable illusion for the theorist and an obstacle for science.

The pregnancy compensation hypothesis provides a mechanistic explanation for the evolution of sex differences in immune system functioning, the excess of women experiencing autoimmune disease, and why this is observed only in industrialized nations; none of which can be explained by the staying alive theory, as proposed by the authors of the target article.

I raise a consideration complementary to those raised in the target article. Many of the most widely cited studies on decision making involve introspection in degraded conditions, namely, conditions in which agents have no reason for the decisions they reach. But the fact that confabulation occurs in degraded conditions does not impugn the reliability of introspection in non-degraded conditions, that is, in cases in which a subject actually does make a choice for a reason.

The model of ownership psychology as a cognitive adaptation proposes that people flexibly navigate cognitive systems of cooperation and competition, thus enabling them to justify unethical behavior. We discuss how this model captures previous accounts of unethical behavior and propose that a disengagement heuristic can help us understand recent findings in the interconnection between scarcity psychology and unethical behavior.

We propose that any theory of visual awareness must explain the gradient of different awareness measures over experimental conditions, especially when those measures form double dissociations among each other. Theories meeting this requirement must be specific to the measured facets of awareness, such as motion, contrast, or color. Integrated information theory (IIT) lacks such specificity because it is an underconstrained theory with unspecific predictions.

Sociobiological explanation requires both a reliable and a valid definition of the sociopathy phenotype. Mealey assumes that such reliable and valid definition of sociopathy exists in her “Integrated Evolutionary Model.” A review of psychiatric literature on the diagnosis of antisocial personality disorder clearly demonstrates that this assumption is faulty. There is substantial disagreement among diagnostic systems (e.g., RDC, DSM-III) over what constitutes the antisocial phenotype, different systems identify different individuals as sociopathic. Without a valid definition of sociopathy, sociobiological theories like Mealey's should be viewed as entirely speculative.

Mormyrid teleosts have Purkinje cells with palisade dendrites, which probably represent coincidence detectors of parallel fiber activity. Their existence strongly supports the ideas of Braitenberg et al. on cerebellar function. However, the organization of mormyrid granule cells and parallel fibers suggests that a key to cerebellar function is not in interactions within one wave, but between two opposite tidal waves.

We argue that an approach that treats short-term memory as activated long-term memory is not inherently in conflict with information recycling in a limited-capacity or working-memory store, or with long-term storage based on the processing in such a store. Language differences aside, real model differences can only be assessed when the contrasting models are formulated precisely.

Barresi & Moore assume an equivalence between ontogenetic and evolutionaiy transformations of social understanding. The mechanisms of evolution allow for novel structures to arise, both through terminal addition and through the onset of novel pathways at time points that precede the end points of ancestral pathways. Terminal addition may not be the appropriate model for the evolution of human object-directed imitation, intermodal equivalence, or joint attention.

In our commentary, we raise concerns with the idea that location should be considered a gestural component of sign languages. We argue that psycholinguistic studies provide evidence for location as a “categorical” element of signs. More generally, we propose that the use of space in sign languages comes in many flavours and may be both categorical and imagistic.

In their target article, Goldin-Meadow & Brentari (G-M&B) discuss several observations suggesting that the use of space is imagistic and may not form part of the categorical properties of sign languages. Specifically, they point out that (1) the number of locations toward which agreeing verbs can be directed is not part of a discrete set, (2) event descriptions by users of different sign languages and hearing nonsigners exhibit marked similarities in the use of space, and (3) location as a phonological parameter is not categorically perceived by native signers. It should be noted that G-M&B acknowledge that categorical properties of location and movement may simply not have been captured yet because the proper investigative tools are not yet readily available.