The idea that dreams function as fright-simulations rests on the adaptionist notion that anything that has form has function, and psychological argument relies on the mentalist assumption that dream reports are accurate reports of experienced events. Neither assumption seems adequately supported by the evidence presented.

[Revonsuo]

This excellent outline of evolutionary hypotheses is compromised by severe reductionism. Other writings succeed in granting theism ontological significance without compromising rigor. The discussion of counterintuitiveness neglects coherence in memory. Bearing in mind our severely limited working memory capacity, susceptibility to religious mythologies may comprise an adaptive heuristic approach to summarizing the contingencies of the most far-reaching of life's problems.

Overall mean performance on intelligence tests by brain-damaged patients with focal lesions can be misleading in regard to localization of intelligence. The widely used WAIS has many subtests that together recruit spatially distant neural “centers,” but individually the subtests reveal localized functions. Moreover, there are kinds of intelligence that defy the localizationist approach inferred from brain damage.

The target article issues a stirring call for more appropriate treatment of chimpanzees in experimental laboratories. This commentary heartily endorses that position with examples of methods and results found in sign language studies of cross-fostered chimpanzees.

Joshua May offers four principles that might serve as the rational foundations of moral judgments. I argue that these principles, if they are independent of affect, are too weak to be the basis of any substantive moral judgment and do not fit with the idea that morality is categorical.

Rahnev & Denison (R&D) argue against normative theories and in favor of a more descriptive “standard observer model” of perceptual decision making. We agree with the authors in many respects, but we argue that optimality (specifically, reward-rate maximization) has proved demonstrably useful as a hypothesis, contrary to the authors’ claims.

Although visual long-term memory (VLTM) and visual short-term memory (VSTM) can be distinguished from each other (and from visual sensory storage [SS]), they are embodied within the same modality-specific brain regions, but in very different ways: VLTM as patterns of connectivity and VSTM as patterns of activity. Perception and VSTM do not “activate” VLTM. They use VLTM to create novel patterns of activity relevant to novel circumstances.

Lewis has missed an excellent opportunity to concisely demonstrate that a dynamical system can provide a bridge between emotion theory and neurobiology.

For the dynamical hypothesis to be defended as a viable alternative to a computational perspective on natural cognition, the role of biological constraints needs to be considered. This task requires a detailed understanding of the structural organization and function of the dynamic nervous system, as well as a theoretical approach that grounds cognitive activity within the constraints of organism and ecological context.

This target article's handling of theory and data and the range of evidence surveyed for its main contention fall short of normal BBS standards. However, the contention itself is reasonable and can be supported if one rejects the “knowledge” metaphor for linguistic competence and accepts that “syntactic principles” are no more than the way the brain does language.

Neural circuits linking local operations in the cortex and the basal ganglia confer reiterative capacities, expressed in seemingly unrelated human traits such as speech, syntax, adaptive actions to changing circumstances, dancing, and music. Reiteration allows the formation of a potentially unbounded number of sentences from a finite set of syntactic processes, obviating the need for the hypothetical “Narrow Faculty of Language.”

We ask what cerebellum and basal ganglia “do,” arguing that cerebellum tunes motor schemas and their coordination. We argue for a synthesis of models addressing the real-time role and error signaling roles of climbing fibers. “Synthetic PET” bridges between regional and neuro-physiological studies, while “synaptie eligibility” relates the neurochemis-try of learning to neural and behavioral levels. [CRÉPEL et al.; HOUK et al.; KANO; LINDEN; SIMPSON et al.; SMITH; THACH; VINCENT]

Examples of how LTP and LTD can control adaptively-timed learning that modulates attention and motor control are given. It is also suggested that LTP/LTD can play a role in storing memories. The distinction between match-based and mismatch-based learning may help to clarify the difference.