There is certainly a need for a framework to guide the study of the physiological mechanisms underlying the experience of music and the emotions that music evokes. However, this framework should be organised hierarchically, with musical anticipation as its fundamental mechanism.

This study involved a partial replication of an experiment performed by Held & Rekosh (1963) on the relation between prism-induced changes in visuomotor feedback and shifts in the perception of straightness. The Held & Rekosh study is important because its methodology makes it possible to clearly separate changes in perception due to visuomotor feedback from those due to other perceptual factors. Thus it bears unambiguously on the hypothesis that the neurological processing of sensory input is dependent on the organization of motor activity. The present paper consists of a brief review of theory and experiment on sensorimotor phenomena in perception, followed by a detailed consideration of the Held & Rekosh study and the present replication. For greater effectiveness, Held & Rekosh should have used base-up and base-down prism orientations rather than the base-left and base-right orientations that they employed, but in any case our replication yielded negative results for both base-up and base-right. It is concluded that, given the minimally effective prism orientation and the attentional loads characterizing the Held & Rekosh study, there is need for further experimentation with these two variables. A more drastic suggestion is that there may be a need to confront anew the evidence for sensorimotor processes in perception.

Recordings of neuronal activity in the monkey superior colliculus (SC) suggest that the two apparently independent effects of a visual distractor on both temporal (latency) and spatial (metrics) saccade parameters may be the result of lateral interactions between subpopulations of saccade-related neurons located at different sites on the motor map of the superior colliculus. One subpopulation is activated during the planing and initiation of a saccade; the other is activated by the appearance of a distractor. The inhibitory or facilitative nature of this interaction depends on the distance between the distractor and the target and is consistent with the complex pattern of intrinsic and commissural collicular connections.

We disagree with Juslin & Västfjäll's (J&V's) thesis that music-evoked emotions are indistinguishable from other emotions in both their nature and underlying mechanisms and that music just induces some emotions more frequently than others. Empirical evidence suggests that frequency differences reflect the specific nature of music-evoked emotions: aesthetic and reactive rather than utilitarian and proactive. Additional mechanisms and determinants are suggested as predictors of emotions triggered by music.

The core issue of our target article concerns how relational complexity should be assessed. We propose that assessments must be based on actual cognitive processes used in performing each step of a task. Complexity comparisons are important for the orderly interpretation of research findings. The links between relational complexity theory and several other formulations, as well as its implications for neural functioning, connectionist models, the roles of knowledge, and individual and developmental differences, are considered.

The spreading of reputational information about group members through gossip represents a widespread, efficient, and low-cost form of punishment. Research shows that negative arousal states motivate individuals to gossip about the transgressions of group members. By sharing information in this way groups are better able to promote cooperation and maintain social control and order.

Research on the capacity to understand others' minds has tended to focus on representations of beliefs, which are widely taken to be among the most central and basic theory of mind representations. Representations of knowledge, by contrast, have received comparatively little attention and have often been understood as depending on prior representations of belief. After all, how could one represent someone as knowing something if one does not even represent them as believing it? Drawing on a wide range of methods across cognitive science, we ask whether belief or knowledge is the more basic kind of representation. The evidence indicates that nonhuman primates attribute knowledge but not belief, that knowledge representations arise earlier in human development than belief representations, that the capacity to represent knowledge may remain intact in patient populations even when belief representation is disrupted, that knowledge (but not belief) attributions are likely automatic, and that explicit knowledge attributions are made more quickly than equivalent belief attributions. Critically, the theory of mind representations uncovered by these various methods exhibits a set of signature features clearly indicative of knowledge: they are not modality-specific, they are factive, they are not just true belief, and they allow for representations of egocentric ignorance. We argue that these signature features elucidate the primary function of knowledge representation: facilitating learning from others about the external world. This suggests a new way of understanding theory of mind – one that is focused on understanding others' minds in relation to the actual world, rather than independent from it.