Boyer & Petersen (B&P) assume that the intuitive systems underlying folk-economic beliefs (FEBs), and, in particular, emporiophobia, evolved in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness (EEA), before markets. This makes the historical development of markets puzzling. We suggest that what evolved in the EEA are templates that help children develop intuitive systems partly adjusted to their cultural environment. This helps resolve the puzzle.

The claim that perception and action are commonly coded because they are indistinguishable at the distal level is crucial for theories of cognition. However, the consequences of this claim run deep, and the Theory of Event Coding (TEC) is not up to the challenge it poses. We illustrate why through a brief review of the evidence that led to the motor theory of speech perception.

We argue that cognitive penetration in non-early vision extends beyond the special situations considered by Pylyshyn. Many situations which do not involve difficult stimuli or require expert skills nevertheless load on high-level cognitive processes. School learning effects illustrate this point: they provide a way to observe task dissociations which support the discontinuity hypothesis, but they show that the scope of visual cognition in our visual experience is often underestimated.

Lea & Webley's (L&W's) Drug Theory solves many puzzles surrounding money-related behavior. I explore supplementing the Drug Theory with ideas from gene-culture coevolution theory and memetic theory.

Anderson suggests that theories of sensorimotor grounding are too narrow to account for his findings of widespread “reuse” supporting multiple different cognitive “task domains.” I call some of the methodological assumptions underlying this conclusion into question, and suggest that his examples reaffirm rather than undermine the special status of sensorimotor processes in cognitive evolution.

We highlight methodological and theoretical limitations of the authors' Dirac formalism and suggest the von Neumann open systems approach as a resolution. The open systems framework is a generalization of classical probability and we hope it will allow cognitive scientists to extend quantum probability from perception, categorization, memory, decision making, and similarity judgments to phenomena in learning and development.

Rahnev & Denison (R&D) catalog numerous experiments in which performance deviates, often in subtle ways, from the theoretical ideal. We discuss an extreme case, an elementary behavior (reactive saccades to single targets) for which a simple contextual manipulation results in responses that are dramatically different from those expected based on reward maximization – and yet are highly informative and amenable to mechanistic examination.

The cell assembly as a simple attractor cannot explain many cognitive phenomena. It must be a highly structured network that can sustain highly structured excitation patterns. Moreover, a cell assembly must be more widely distributed in space than on a square millimeter.

Leibovich et al. proposed that the processing of numerosities is based primarily on a “sense of magnitude.” The consequences of this proposal for how numerical symbols acquire their meaning are, however, neglected. We argue that symbols cannot be learned by associating them with a system that is not yet able to derive discrete numbers accurately because of immature cognitive control.

Hurford's argument suffers from two major weaknesses. First, his account of neural mechanisms suggests no place in the brain where the two halves of a predicate-argument structure could come together. Second, his assumption that language and cognition must be based on logic is neither necessary nor particularly plausible, and leads him to some unlikely conclusions.

Latent variable modeling has revealed important conundrums in the DSM classification system. We agree that the network perspective has potential to inspire new insights and resolve some of these conundrums. We note, however, that alone it cannot really help us understand etiology. Etiology, not comorbidity, is the fundamental question.