The first cortically based associative circuits integrated olfactory, motivational, and motor information. Many of the neural dynamics present in these evolutionarily ancient, olfactory-motor circuits, such as the broadband frequency, phase, and amplitude modulations seen during recognition of a rewarded olfactory stimulus, are also found in isocortical circuits. These results suggest that mechanisms permitting olfactory associative processing formed the basis for evolutionarily more recent large-scale couplings involving isocortical areas.

Near the end of his target article, Baron argues that we need to address the question of how to conduct education in consequentialist decision making. However, recent trends in education have deemphasized and denigrated decentered and decontextualized thought. It is argued here that perspective decentering and decontextualized thinking are absolutely essential to the development of consequentialist reasoning.

Clarke and Beck use behavioural evidence to argue that (1) approximate ratio computations are sufficient for claiming that the approximate number system (ANS) represents the rationals, and (2) the ANS does not represent the reals. We argue that pure behaviour is a poor litmus test for this problem, and that we should trust the psychophysical models that place ANS representations within the reals.

Rolls's book, The brain and emotion is an important and valuable contribution to our understanding of the brain mechanisms that underlie emotional processes. Its explanatory value is less obvious when it comes to psychological and philosophical issues concerning the nature of emotions.

Facial expressions of pain may be best conceptualized as an example of an evolved propensity to communicate distress, rather than as a distinct category of facial expression. The operant model goes beyond the evolutionary account, as it can explain how the (facial) expression of pain can become maladaptive as a result of its capability to elicit attention and caring behavior in the observer.

In the theory outlined in the target article, an animal forages continuously, making sequential decisions in a world where the amount of food and its uncertainty are fixed, but delays are variable. These assumptions contrast with the risk-sensitive foraging theory and create a problem for comparing the predictions of this model with many laboratory experiments that do not make these assumptions.

Although clinical studies and animal models seem to establish an important role for the sympathetic nervous system in many forms of neuropathic and inflammatory pain, there is an ongoing debate on the classification of pain syndromes with sympathetic components. The confusion originates from several sources: failure to acknowledge that the pathomechanism of chronic pain can change during the progress of the disease, which is now strongly underlined by experimental data from suitable animal models. Neuropathic pain is a vaguely defined collection of pain syndromes which includes painful conditions with diverse and largely unknown patho-mechanisms. Clinical diagnosis is difficult and well designed, placebo controlled sympathectomy is rarely performed. [blumberg et al.]

Low-income environments have been associated with greater levels of impulsive behavior, which contribute to the higher debt and obesity rates that further perpetuate current wealth and health disparities. In this commentary, we describe how this might be explained by an appeal to “incentive hope” and the motivational drive toward consumption triggered by the future uncertainty these groups face.

“Psychology Game Theory” grafts social-process explanations onto classical game theory to explain deviations from instrumental rationality caused by the social properties of cooperation. This leads to confusion between cooperation as a social or individual behavior, and between ultimate and proximate explanations. If game theory models explain the existence of cooperation, different models are needed for understanding the proximate social processes that underlie cooperation in the real world.

Writing systems encode linguistic information in diverse ways, relying on cognitive procedures that are likely to be general purpose rather than specific to reading. Optimality in reading for meaning is achieved via the entire communicative act, involving, when the need arises, syntax, nonlinguistic context, and selective attention.

Very young children occasionally commit scale errors, which involve a dramatic dissociation between planning and control: A child's visual representation of the size of a miniature object is not used in planning an action on it, but is used in the control of the action. Glover's planning–control model offers a very useful framework for analyzing this newly documented phenomenon.

Analogies between biological and cultural evolution may be illuminating and suggest methods to pursue in the quest for a unified science of cultural evolution. Significant progress, however, is unlikely to be made by trying to fit cultural evolution neatly into a biological evolution schema. A key element defining and differentiating cultural evolution may be the role of conscious human choices.

The central problem in Geary's theory is how differences are conceptualized. Recent research has shown that between-sex differences on certain tasks are a consequence of averaging within sex differences. A mixture distribution models between-sex differences on several tasks well and does not appear congenial to a sexual-selection perspective.

In their use of correlations as a means to distinguish between different views on the normative/descriptive gap, Stanovich & West discuss the competence component but neglect the activation-utilization component of performance. Different degrees of motivation may introduce systematic variation that is confounded with the variation explained by cognitive capacity.