The challenges raised in this article are not with information theory per se, but the assumptions surrounding it. Neuroscience isn't sufficiently critical about the appropriate ‘receiver’ or ‘channel’, focuses on decoding ‘parts’, and often relies on a flawed ‘veridicality’ assumption. If these problematic assumptions were questioned, information theory could be better directed to help us understand how the brain works.

Autism often co-occurs with alexithymia, a condition characterized by no or diminished awareness of emotions that significantly impacts an individual's social relationships. We investigate how the social motivation of autistics would be eroded by comorbidity with alexithymia and why this diminished motivation would be difficult for non-autistic people to perceive and reciprocate.

I suggest psychologists would more profitably study a totally different area of human reasoning than is discussed in the target article – the inductive reasoning people use in their everyday life that matters in consequential real-life decision making, rather than the deductive reasoning that psychologists have studied meticulously but that has relatively less ecological relevance to people's lives.

According to the view that humans are conscious automata, the experience of conscious will is illusory. Epistemic theories of causation, however, make room for causal will, planned behavior, and moral action.

Though it draws on the grammatical metaphor of person (first, third, second) in terms of representations, Schilbach et al.'s target article does not consider an orthogonal line of evidence for the centrality of interaction to social cognition: the many grammatical phenomena, some widespread cross-linguistically and some only being discovered, which are geared to supporting real-time interaction. My commentary reviews these, and the contribution linguistic evidence can make to a fuller account of social cognition.

Our commentary focuses, first, on Glover's proposal that only motor planning is sensitive to cognitive aspects of the target object, whereas the on-line control is completely immune to them. We present behavioural data showing that movement phases traditionally (and by Glover) thought to be under on-line control, are also modulated by object cognitive aspects. Next, we present data showing that some aspects of cognition can be coded by means of movement planning. We propose a reformulation of Glover's theory to include both an influence of cognition on on-line movement control, and a mutual influence between motor planning and some aspects of cognition.

The extent to which human learning should be thought of in terms of elementary, automatic versus controlled, cognitive processes is unresolved after nearly a century of often fierce debate. Mitchell et al. provide a persuasive review of evidence against automatic, unconscious links. Indeed, unconscious processes seem to play a negligible role in any form of learning, not just in Pavlovian conditioning. But a modern connectionist framework, in which “cognitive” phenomena are emergent properties, is likely to offer a fuller account of human learning than the propositional framework Mitchell et al. propose.

One implication of Laland, Odling-Smee & Feldman's niche construction model concerns the significance of the role of behavioural or cultural traits in comparative analysis. In this commentary it is suggested that cladistic methods already recognise this importance, and that behavioural characters may play a key role in hominid speciation and the definition of species.

A psycho-historical framework for the science of art appreciation will be an experimental discipline that may shed new light on the highest capacities of the human brain, yielding new scientific ways to talk about the art appreciation. The recent findings of the contextual information processing in the human brain make the concept of the art-historical context clear for empirical experimentation.

The target paper claims to contribute to the conceptualisation of kinship but is, in fact, only concerned with descriptive kinship terminologies. It uses Optimal Theory to analyse this vocabulary but it is not clear if this is to be understood as a psychological phenomenon. Jones does not make clear how this special vocabulary might relate to kinship in general.

Top-down dynamical models of cognitive processes, such as the one presented by Thelen et al., are important pieces in understanding the development of cognitive abilities in humans and biological organisms. Unlike standard symbolic computational approaches to cognition, such dynamical models offer the hope that they can be connected with more bottom-up, neurologically inspired dynamical models to provide a complete view of cognition at all levels. We raise some questions about the details of their simulation and about potential limitations of top-down dynamical models.