Boyer suggests that laws cannot account for ownership intuitions, but there may be situations when intuitions hew to laws almost perfectly. Laws granting governments taxation powers provide an interesting case study. We report data here suggesting that people's intuitions track law very closely, and are unaffected by manipulating a P() tag input. We propose two hypotheses to explain this finding.

Pascal Boyer achieves a felicitous integration of what is known about human ownership psychology by deriving ownership intuitions from the interaction of resource acquisition and our cooperative sociality. By exploring the sense of ownership already present in the domain of resource acquisition, I sketch an evolutionary path to the open-ended nature of the specifically human version of that sense.

The model of ownership psychology as a cognitive adaptation proposes that people flexibly navigate cognitive systems of cooperation and competition, thus enabling them to justify unethical behavior. We discuss how this model captures previous accounts of unethical behavior and propose that a disengagement heuristic can help us understand recent findings in the interconnection between scarcity psychology and unethical behavior.

Psychological ownership may be judged differently or similarly for self and others. Potential differences in how ownership is evaluated by actors and observers raise important questions about the concept of ownership (what is Mine, Ours, and Theirs) and how to resolve conflicting perceptions.

Our commentary challenges Boyer's model by arguing that the extended-self is a more likely basis for ownership psychology. We outline how self-based principles of investment and control might structure thinking about ownership and related rights. We end by expanding the extended-self account to include welfare, as a way of understanding the contexts under which ownership is upheld or violated.

Boyer's minimalist model is a compelling account of ownership psychology that is more efficient than previous models. However, it is unclear whether the two simple systems that make up this model – acquisitiveness and cooperation – are sufficient to both explain the nuanced development of ownership concepts and to account for the prominent influence that history has on ownership psychology.

Research is increasingly suggesting that human intuitions form the core of many laws. Laws, therefore, can serve as one potential testing ground for new theories about the content and structure of intuitions. Here the model of ownership psychology as an evolved cognitive adaptation is evaluated against long-standing features of property law.

Boyer's minimalist model of human ownership psychology overlooks important cues that children provide in their development leading them from pre-conceptual to conceptual (symbolic) expressions of the basic feeling experience of control over things, qua ownership in the most basic psychological sense. Appeal for innate core knowledge and evolutionary logic blows out the light of this rich and unique ontogenetic progression.

The proposed model overlooks the self-referential and self-perpetuating nature of ownership intuitions. Human knowledge is primarily formed through social interaction within power dynamics. Accordingly, we suggest that legitimate ownership of one object can influence perceptions of legitimate ownership of another object. Ultimately, we argue that ownership intuitions are not independent but embedded in a self-referential system that perpetuates inequality.

Why can't we own people? Boyer proposes that the key consideration concerns inclusion in the moral circle. I propose an alternative, which is that specific mental capacities, especially the capacity for autonomy, play a key role in determining judgments about human and animal ownership. Autonomous beings are viewed as owning themselves, which precludes them from being owned by others.

Boyer's model posits that ownership intuitions are delivered by combining input representations of resource conflict and cooperative value, necessary to solve coordination dilemmas over resource access. Here I evaluate the implications of this claim for early social cognition and argue that cognitively frugal possession concepts can be leveraged to the same inferential end, making the ascription of ownership proper unnecessary.

What are the origins of ownership as a conceptual domain? By combining experimental evidence from cognitive science, a theoretical proposal from developmental psychology, and the computational framework of reinforcement learning, I argue that ownership concepts can develop as a by-product of our curiosity-based exploration and become grounded via our experience of control in physical and social environments.

Boyer's minimal model of ownership psychology suggests that joint possession triggers representations of collective agency. However, many forms of co-ownership based on cooperation or competition can be represented as a set of P() or L() tags without inferring a unifying collective entity. Moreover, representations of partible ownership are required to engage in cooperative production and distribution of resources.

Boyer's formulation neglects that humans are embodied agents. It is a biological imperative to distinguish self from other. Ownership of ideas, bodies, objects, and locations is an inevitable extension of this. We argue that (1) the body's capability influences the inputs that guide future actions, and (2) bodies in action influence all of cognition, from perception to decision making.

Commentators discussed the coherence and validity of a minimalist approach to ownership intuitions, in ways that make it possible to clarify the model, re-evaluate its cognitive underpinnings, and sketch some of its implications. This response summarizes the model; addresses issues concerning the need for a special technical lexicon when describing cognitive semantics; the psychology involved in contexts of competitive acquisition and their consequences for possession and use of rival resources; the role of cooperative expectations in creating mutually beneficial allocation of resources; the consequences of ownership psychology for social interaction and the production of social norms of property; and the relations between psychological processes and legal institutions in the domain, before proposing some final thoughts.

Involuntary autobiographical memories (IAMs) and déjà vu are phenomena that occur spontaneously in daily life. IAMs are recollections of the personal past, whereas déjà vu is defined as an experience in which the person feels familiarity at the same time as knowing that the familiarity is false. We present and discuss the idea that both IAMs and déjà vu can be explained as natural phenomena resulting from memory processing and, importantly, are both based on the same memory retrieval processes. Briefly, we hypothesise that both can be described as “involuntary” or spontaneous cognitions, where IAMs deliver content and déjà vu delivers only the feeling of retrieval. We map out the similarities and differences between the two, making a theoretical and neuroscientific account for their integration into models of memory retrieval and how the autobiographical memory literature can explain these quirks of daily life and unusual but meaningful phenomena. We explain the emergence of the déjà vu phenomenon by relating it to well-known mechanisms of autobiographical memory retrieval, concluding that IAMs and déjà vu lie on a continuum.

Barzykowski and Moulin's view on involuntary autobiographical memory focuses on automatic activation of representations and inhibitory control mechanisms. We discuss how and when a known neural mechanism – pattern completion – may result in involuntary autobiographical memories, the types of cues that may elicit this phenomenon and consider interactions with future-oriented cognition.

Barzykowski and Moulin argue that déjà vu is a natural product of autobiographical memory retrieval. Their proposal fails to account for three salient properties of déjà vu experiences: Their strangeness, their infrequency, and their characteristically sudden onset. Accounting for these properties is necessary for proper integration of déjà vu into autobiographical memory research.

I strongly support Barzykowski and Moulin in their proposal that common retrieval mechanisms can lead to distinct phenomenological memory experiences. I emphasize the importance of one of these mechanisms, namely the attribution system. Neuropsychological studies should help clarifying the role of these retrieval mechanisms, notably in cases of medial temporal-lobe lesions and cases of dementia.

External cues and internal configuration states are the likely instigators of involuntary autobiographical memories (IAMs) and déjà vu experience. Indeed, Barzykowski and Moulin discuss relevant neuroscientific evidence in this direction. A complementary line of enquiry and evidence is the study of inhibition and its role in memory retrieval, and particularly how its (dys)function may contribute to IAMs and déjà vu.