Although we see much utility in Osiurak and Reynaud's in-depth discussion on the role of what they term technical reasoning in cumulative culture, we argue that they neglect the time and energy costs that individuals would have to face to acquire skills in the absence of specific socio-cognitive abilities.

We agree with Cesario's premise but reject his conclusion: Although experimental studies of racial stereotyping, weapons perception, and shoot decisions typically exclude real-world contextual factors and thus have limited relevance to race disparities (e.g., in policing), these excluded factors comprise systemic, institutional, and individual-level biases that are more likely to amplify racial disparities than negate them.

Grossmann's argument for the “fearful ape hypothesis” rests on an incomplete review of infant responses to emotional faces. An alternate interpretation of the literature argues the opposite, that an early preference for happy faces predicts cooperative learning. Questions remain as to whether infants can interpret affect from faces, limiting the conclusion that any “fear bias” means the infant is fearful.

An evolutionary model of human behavior should privilege emotions: essential, phylogenetically ancient behaviors that learning and decision making only subserve. Infants and non-mammals lack advanced cognitive powers but still survive. Decision making is only a means to emotional ends, which organize and prioritize behavior. The emotion of pride/shame, or dominance striving, bridges the social and biological sciences via internalization of cultural norms.

It is very tempting to try to reconcile perception and cognition perceptual symbol systems may be a good way to achieve this; but is there actually a perception-cognition continuum? We offer several arguments for and against the existence of such a continuum and in favor of the choice of perceptual symbol systems. One of these arguments is purely theoretical, some are based on PET-scan observations and others are based on research with handicapped subjects who have communication problems associated with cerebral lesions. These arguments suggest that modal perceptual symbols do indeed exist and that perception and cognition might have a common neuronal basis; but perceptual and cognitive activities require the activation of different neuronal structures.

Group assortative biases are stronger in regions where pathogen stress has been historically prevalent. Pushing the logic of this approach, extensions should include investigations of how cultural norms related to prosociality and relational striving may also covary with regional pathogen stress. Likewise, the pan-specific observation that diseased animals show decreased motor activity to facilitate recovery suggests that norms relevant to sickness behaviors may also vary as a function of regional parasite stress.

Although we agree that ritualized behavior is a mystery that calls out for an explanation, we do not think that the proposed domain-specific two-component system offers an empirically well-justified and theoretically parsimonious description of the phenomena. Instead, we believe that the deployment of domain-general mechanisms based on choice of actions could also explain the essential features of ritualized behavior.

The perceptual circularity demonstrated by R. Shepard with respect to hue turns out to be a sphericity of color perception based on color excitation vectors of neuronal level. The spherical color model implicitly contains information concerning generalization under color learning. Subjective color differences are “computed” in neuronal nets being represented by amplitudes of evoked potentials triggered by color change. [Shepard]

Fitness interdependence is the degree to which two or more organisms influence each other's success in replicating their genes. Identity fusion may be a proximate mechanism that aligns behavior with fitness interdependence. Although identity fusion may usually lead to behaviors that are fitness enhancing, in evolutionarily novel environments, it may be hijacked in ways that are highly detrimental to fitness.

The tendency to neglect base-rates in judgment under uncertainty may be “notorious,” as Barbey & Sloman (B&S) suggest, but it is neither inevitable (as they document; see also Koehler 1996) nor unique. Here we would like to point out another line of evidence connecting ecological rationality to dual processes, the failure of individuals to appropriately judge cumulative probability.

Guala contests the validity of strong reciprocity as a key element in shaping social behavior by contrasting evidence from experimental games to that of natural and historic data. He suggests that in order to understand the evolution of social behavior researchers should focus on natural data and weak reciprocity. We disagree with Guala's proposal to shift the focus of the study from one extreme of the spectrum (strong reciprocity) to the other extreme (weak reciprocity). We argue that the study of the evolution of social behavior must be comparative in nature, and we point out experimental evidence that shows that social behavior is not cooperation determined by a set of fixed factors. We argue for a model that sees social behavior as a dynamic interaction of genetic and environmental factors.

The posterior parietal cortex and frontal eye field contain maps of visual salience on which the decision to choose a saccade may be based. However, an averaging express saccade is not represented by a victorious unimodal representation in the superior colliculus. Normalization as described by Findlay & Walker is not necessary for the generation of saccades.

Children come to joint action with a generalized sense of “reason,” which carries normative implications, before personalizing reasons. A general sense of ought precedes specific notions of individual perspective.

Severity of Test (SoT) is an alternative to Popper's logical falsification that solves a number of problems of the logical view. It was presented by Popper himself in 1963. SoT is a less sophisticated probabilistic model of hypothesis testing than Oaksford & Chater's (O&C's) information gain model, but it has a number of striking similarities. Moreover, it captures the intuition of everyday hypothesis testing.

Evidence is presented for the notion that selection-for-perception and selection-for-action progress in parallel to become tightly coupled at the saccade target before the execution of the movement. Such a conception might be incorporated in the E-Z Reader model of eye-movement control in reading.