We argue that ownership is a highly flexible concept, shaped by both innate and learned aspects, and heavily influenced by culture. Boyer's model focuses solely on universal personal ownership, neglecting other forms such as shared ownership, fractionalized property rights, and the ownership of the meanings and memories attached to possessions. A comprehensive understanding requires considering diverse human relationships with objects.

There are two sorts of scientists: Dionysians, who rely on intuition, and Apollonians, who are more systematic. Self-experimentation is a Dionysian approach that is likely to open new lines of research. Unfortunately, the Dionysian approach does not allow one to predict the results of experiments. That is one reason why self-experimentation is not popular among granting agencies.

The GANE (glutamate amplifies noradrenergic effects) theory posits a mechanism for amplifying noradrenergic modulatory actions and enhancing the processing of high-priority sensory signals for immediate or future experience-guided action. This theoretical construct is thought provoking with respect to the central processing of high-priority versus low-priority stimuli, but it requires some refinement to account for physiological fluctuations in NE efflux as a function of naturally occurring transitions in behavioral state and the experimentally observed phenomena associated with noradrenergic regulation of sensory signal transfer.

The definition of cruelty used by the author is broad and ambiguous and does not distinguish between acts of sadism, abuse, and neglect that all lead to the suffering of other beings. Some of the research involving animal cruelty is reviewed with the aim of raising questions about the relevance of the painblooddeath (PBD) complex described by Nell.

Obligation as defined by Tomasello requires mutually capable parties, but one-sided caregiver relationships reveal its developmental and evolutionary precursors. Specifically, “coercive” emotions may prompt protective action by caregivers toward infant primates, and infants show distress toward caregivers when they appear to violate expectations in their relationships. We argue that these early social-relational expectations and emotions may form the base of obligation.

A pair of arguments suggests that self-control is not properly conceptualized on the pattern/act/preference model Rachlin proposes. The first concerns the irrational following of personal rules. The second concerns scenarios in which behavioral patterns an agent deems good come into conflict.

An attention shift from a stationary to a changing object has to occur in feature – rather than physical – space, in order to bind these stimuli into a unitary percept. This time-consuming shift leads to the perception of a changing stimulus further ahead along its trajectory. This attentional framework is able to accommodate the flash-lag effect in its multiple empirical manifestations.

Doris proposes that the exercise of morally responsible agency unfolds as a collaborative dialogue among selves expressing their values while being subject to ever-present constraints. We assess the fit of Doris's account with recent data from psychology and neuroscience related to how people make judgments about moral agency (responsibility, blame), and how they understand the self after traumatic events.

Clark and Fischer propose that people interpret social robots not as social agents, but as interactive depictions. Drawing on research focusing on how children selectively learn from social others, we argue that children do not view social robots as interactive toys but instead treat them as social learning partners and critical sources of information.

In this commentary on Firestone & Scholl's (F&S's) article, we argue that researchers should use brain-activity modelling to investigate top-down mechanisms. Using functional brain imaging and a specific cognitive paradigm, modelling the BOLD signal provided new insight into the dynamic causalities involved in the influence of cognitions on perceptions.

This is a welcome attempt to seek common biological principles underlying laterality in animals and humans. I do not think it is wholly convincing, but this is partly because many of the results from nonhuman species are not yet firmly established or understood. I suspect that the author's characterization of lateralization, with the left hemisphere supposedly specialized for communicative functions and the right for spatial and affective functions, will require modification. For instance, it now seems fairly clear that the left hemisphere in humans plays a general role in the production and perception of sequences not restricted to communicative acts (Craig 1980; Kimura 1979), and indeed some of the examples of left-hemispheric specialization listed in Table 2 are not obviously communicative. Even so, there are some fairly striking parallels between humans and nonhumans with respect to the pattern of lateralization, and one suspects that common principles are operating. At the same time, in the enthusiastic search for functional asymmetries, we should not overlook the striking degree of bilateral symmetry that characterizes the brains of all animals, including humans.

Chimpanzee/human technological differences are vast, reflect multiple interacting behavioral processes, and may result from the increased information-processing and hierarchical mental constructional capacities of the human brain. Therefore, advanced social, technical, and communicative capacities probably evolved together in concert with increasing brain size. Interpretations of these evolutionary and species differences as continuities or discontinuities reflect differing scientific perspectives.

We argue that Machery provides no convincing evidence that prototypes and exemplars are typically used in distinct cognitive processes. This partially undermines the fourth tenet of the Heterogeneity Hypothesis and thus casts doubts on Machery's way of splitting concepts into different kinds. Although Machery may be right that concepts split into different kinds, such kinds may be different from those countenanced by the Heterogeneity Hypothesis.