The consideration of humans going through sensitive periods of life, such as childhood and the early postpartum, may be helpful in understanding the cognitive and evolutionary puzzle of human rituals. During such periods, certain brain systems may mediate an increased susceptibility to learn new behaviors, rational or irrational.

In this commentary we would like to question (a) Clark and Fischer's characterization of the “social artifact puzzle” – which we consider less puzzling than the authors, and (b) their account of social robots as depictions involving three physical scenes – which to us seems unnecessarily complex. We contrast the authors' model with a more parsimonious account based on attributions.

Empathy is a developmental process whereby individuals come to understand the emotional states of others. While the exact nature of this process remains unknown, PAM's utility is that it establishes empathy along a continuum of behavior ranging from emotional contagion to cognitive forms, a very useful distinction for understanding the phylogeny and ontogeny of this important process. The model will undoubtedly fuel future research, especially from comparative domains where data are most problematic.

This commentary focuses on the bidirectional links between unconscious influences and decision making. In particular, it examines the extent to which awareness is (not) necessary to the impact of decisions on psychological processes such as preferences. This analysis might help researchers to gain an extended perspective of Newell & Shanks' (N&S's) concerns regarding the role of unconscious influences in theories of decision making.

We sympathize with many of the points Burt makes in challenging the value of genetics to advance our understanding of social science. Here, we discuss how recent reflections on epistemic validity in the behavioral sciences can further contribute to a reappraisal of the role of sociogenomics to explain and predict human traits, aptitudes, and achievement.

Viewing communication as a dynamic system is laudable; arguing that the approach is novel is questionable. Some researchers studying nonhuman communication other than ape language have been using such an approach for decades. A brief description of an avian system provides one such example. Interestingly, the dynamic social system described in the target article may have a developmental neuronal basis.

Leibovich et al. hypothesize that the absence of visual object individuation limits infants' numerical skills and necessitates a reliance on continuous magnitudes. We argue that parallels between infants' numerical discrimination in the visual and auditory modalities, their abilities to match numerosities across modalities, and their greater ability to discriminate changes in number compared with continuous magnitudes contradict the authors' assumptions.

This review evaluates pros and cons of the schema theory as a general framework for expressing what Arbib et al. call “systems neuroscience.” We discuss the software/hardware duality of the schema concept and the relative neglect of the mechanical properties of muscles. We propose a computational alternative to the functional decomposition in terms of schemas.

A number of difficulties encumber the Suddendorf & Corballis (S&C) proposal regarding mental time travel into the future. Among these are conceptual issues turning on the inherent asymmetry of time and causality with regard to past and future, and the bearing of such asymmetry on the uses and utility of retrospective versus prospective mental time travel, on which I comment.

A second-person neuroscience, as an emerging area of neuroscience and the behavioral sciences, cannot afford to avoid a bottom-up, subcortical, and conative-affective perspective. An example with canid social play and a modern motivational behavioral neursocience will illustrate our point.

The problem of the biology of money is twofold: It subsumes both the identification of behavioral mechanisms that account for the power of money as an incentive, and the elucidation of the phylogeny of such mechanisms. The drugs–tool distinction, as articulated by Lea & Webley (L&W) in their fascinating synthesis, is a welcome step toward their solution. Compared to the direct invocation of instinctual drives, however, conditioning processes provide a conceptually and empirically clearer road from evolution to money.

Speakers retrieve words to use them in sentences. Errors in incorporating words into sentential frames are revealing with respect to the lexical units as well as the lexical retrieval mechanism; hence they constrain theories of lexical access. We present a reanalysis of a corpus of spontaneously occurring lexical exchange errors that highlights the contact points between lexical and sentential processes.

The difficulty of making reliable interpretation from a dense cloud of unreliable correlations means that the grounds for making a testable “biological,” or brain-based, theory of intelligence remain very shaky. We briefly discuss the conceptual and methodological problems that arise and suggest one possible alternative interpretation of the data.

Von Hippel & Trivers (VH&T) dismiss in a couple of pages the possible costs of self-deception. But there is a downside to self-deception that they do not consider. This is the loss of psychological insight into deceit by others that blindness to deceit by oneself is likely to entail.