The target article by Byrne & Russon treats imitation as an achievement that originates from observation. In my commentary I propose extending the database to the role of listening. Referring to current studies on song learning in birds, I suggest that at least some features of this accomplishment also may be based on learning by imitation.

Crespi & Badcock (C&B) convincingly argue that autism and schizophrenia are diametric malfunctions of the social brain, but their core imprinting hypothesis is less persuasive. Much of the evidence they cite is unrelated to their hypothesis, is selective, or is overstated; their hypothesis lacks a clearly explained mechanism; and it is unclear how their explanation fits in with known aspects of the disorders.

Dubourg and Baumard posited that preferences for exploration are the key to the popularity in imaginary worlds. This commentary argues that other forms of exploration may also account for the success and appeal of specific types of imaginary worlds, namely self-exploration within interactive imaginary worlds such as videogames.

Hoerl & McCormack claim that the temporal updating system only represents the world as present. This generates puzzles regarding the phenomenology of temporal experience. We argue that recent models of reinforcement learning suggest that temporal updating must have a minimal temporal structure; and we suggest that this helps to clarify what it means to experience the world as temporally structured.

Bowers et al. focus their criticisms on research that compares behavioral and brain data from the ventral stream with a class of deep neural networks for object recognition. While they are right to identify issues with current benchmarking research programs, they overlook a much more fundamental limitation of this literature: Disregarding the importance of action and interaction for perception.

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.

We suggest in this commentary an emotional origin of the Industrial Revolution. Specifically, increased living standards directly preceding the Industrial Revolution produced increased happiness and subjective well-being that, in turn, fueled the explosion of innovation and economic growth experienced in industrial England.

Baumard proposes a model to explain the dramatic rise in innovation that occurred during the Industrial Revolution, whereby rising living standards led to slower life history strategies, which, in turn, fostered innovation. We test his model explicitly using time series data, finding limited support for these proposed linkages. Instead, we find evidence that rising living standards appear to have a time-lagged bidirectional relationship with increasing innovation.

Osiurak and Reynaud (O&R) claim that research into the origin of cumulative technological culture has been too focused on social cognition and has consequently neglected the importance of uniquely human reasoning capacities. This commentary raises two interrelated theoretical concerns about O&R's notion of technical-reasoning capacities, and suggests how these concerns might be met.

The Functional Visual Field (FVF) offers explanatory power. To us, it relates to existing literature on the flexibility of attentional focus in visual search and reading (Eriksen & St. James 1986; McConkie & Rayner 1975). The target article promotes reflection on existing findings. Here we consider the FVF as a mechanism in the Prevalence Effect (PE) in visual search.

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.

Empirical studies involve WEIRD (Western, European, industrialized, rich, democratic) but also un-nested (raised outside humanity's evolved nest) and underdeveloped participants. Assessing human moral potential needs to integrate a transdisciplinary approach to understanding species typicality and baselines, relevant evolutionary inheritances beyond genes, assessment of cultures and practices that foster (or not) virtue, and ecological morality. Human moral reason (nous) emerges from all of these.

With respect to De Dreu and Gross's article, we comment on the psychological functions for attack and defense, focusing on associations between individual differences in psychopathic personality traits and the behavioral patterns observed in attack-defense conflicts. We highlight the dimensional nature of psychopathy and formulate hypothetical associations between distinct traits, their different behavioral outcomes, and associated brain mechanisms.

First, I argue that there is no agreement within non-classical cognitive science as to whether one should eliminate representations, hence, it is not clear that Brette's appeal to it is going to solve the problems with coding. Second, I argue that Brette's criticism of predictive coding as being intellectualistic is not justified, as predictive coding is compatible with embodied cognition.

Modern societies are characterized by group-based hierarchies. Similar to attackers, disadvantaged-group members wish to change the status quo; like defenders, advantaged-group members wish to protect it. However, the psychological arrays that are typical of disadvantaged- and advantaged-group members are opposite to those of attackers and defenders – suggesting that the Attacker-Defender Game does not capture the dynamics between advantaged and disadvantaged groups.

The integrative memory model formalizes a new conceptualization of memory in which interactions between representations and cognitive operations within large-scale cerebral networks generate subjective memory feelings. Such interactions allow to explain the complexity of memory expressions, such as the existence of multiples sources for familiarity and recollection feelings and the fact that expectations determine how one recognizes previously encountered information.

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) subjects can present temporary behaviors of acute agitation and aggressiveness, named problem behaviors. They have been shown to be consistent with the self-organized criticality (SOC), a model wherein occasionally occurring “catastrophic events” are necessary in order to maintain a self-organized “critical equilibrium.” The SOC can represent the psychopathology network structures and additionally suggests that they can be considered as self-organized systems.

This call to revolution in theories of visual search does not go far enough. Treating fixations as uniform is an oversimplification that obscures the critical role of the mind. We remind readers that what happens during a fixation depends on mindset, as shown in studies of search strategy and of humans' ability to rapidly resume search following an interruption.

Do we acquire culture through other minds, or do we get access to other minds through culture? Music culture is a practice as well as the people involved. Sounding music works as a script guiding action, as do, to varying degrees, many rituals and customs. Collective co-performance of the script enables inter-subjectivity, which arguably contributes to the formation of subcultures. Shared-emotional experiences give material to the narrative of who we are.

Cesario argues that experiments cannot illuminate real group disparities because they leave out factors that operate in ordinary life. But what Cesario calls flaws are, in fact, the point of the experimental method. Of all the topics in science, we have to wonder why racial discrimination would be uniquely unsuited for investigating with experiments. The argument to give up the most powerful scientific method to study one of the hardest problems we confront is laughable.