Self-deception is a powerful but overapplied theory. It is adaptive only when a deception-detecting audience is in the loop, not when an inaccurate representation is invoked as an internal motivator. First, an inaccurate representation cannot be equated with self-deception, which entails two representations, one inaccurate and the other accurate. Second, any motivational advantages are best achieved with an adjustment to the decision rule on when to act, not with a systematic error in an internal representation.

Plasticity of body representation fundamentally underpins human tool use. Recent studies have demonstrated remarkably complex plasticity of body representation in humans, showing that such plasticity (1) occurs flexibly across multiple time scales and (2) involves multiple body representations responding differently to tool use. Such findings reveal remarkable sophistication of body plasticity in humans, suggesting that Vaesen may overestimate the similarity of such mechanisms in humans and non-human primates.

Cooperative peer play emerges in the second year of life. How applicable is Preston & de Waal's (P&deW's) model to the empathic processes in cooperative play? Empathic responses during peer play are more general than they propose, and more dependent on mental state understanding. Moreover, peer play forces children to reason about others' feelings, possibly serving as a unique mechanism for empathy development.

In this commentary, I argue that to properly assess the significance of the cross-cultural findings reviewed by Henrich et al., one needs to understand better the causes of the variation in performance in experimental tasks across cultures.

The climato-economic theory postulates mechanisms of threat and challenge to explain differences between countries. Interestingly, both of these mechanisms are often considered to be components of the models of organizational climate for creativity. We show that among rich countries, climatic demands are related to creative achievement in a reversed-U manner, whereas the relationship is linear among poor countries.

Dijkerman & de Haan (D&dH) argue that body image and body schema form parts of different and dissociable somatosensory streams. We agree in general, but believe that more emphasis should be placed on interactions between these two streams. We illustrate this point with evidence from the rubber-hand illusion (RHI) – an illusion of body image, which depends critically upon body schema.

Branigan & Pickering (B&P) advocate the use of syntactic priming to investigate linguistic representations and argue that it overcomes several purported deficiencies of acceptability judgments. While we recognize the merit of drawing attention to a potentially underexplored experimental methodology in language science, we do not believe that the empirical evidence supports B&P's claims about acceptability judgments. We present the relevant evidence.

Mele's study of philosophical and psychological theories of self-deception informatively links the conceptual and dynamic aspects of self-deception and explicates it without positing mutually inconsistent beliefs, such as those occurring in two-person deception. It is argued, however, that he does not do full justice to the dissociation characteristic of self-deception and does not sufficiently distinguish self-deception from self-caused deception.

Dynamics is not enough for cognition, nor it is a substitute for information-processing aspects of brain behavior. Moreover, dynamics and computation are not at odds, but are quite compatible. They can be synthesized so that any dynamical system can be analyzed in terms of its intrinsic computational components.

We address the commentaries on our target article in terms of four major themes. First, we note that virtually all commentators agree that mental disorders are not brain disorders in the common interpretation of these terms, and establish the consensus that explanatory reductionism is not a viable thesis. Second, we address criticisms to the effect that our article was misdirected or aimed at a straw man; we argue that this is unlikely, given the widespread communication of reductionist slogans in psychopathology research and society. Third, we tackle the question of whether intentionality, extended systems, and multiple realizability are as problematic as claimed in the target article, and we present a number of nuances and extensions with respect to our article. Fourth, we discuss the question of how the network approach should incorporate biological factors, given that wholesale reductionism is an unlikely option.

By examining single-word reading times (in full sentences read for meaning), we show that (1) function words are accessed faster than content words, independent of perceptual characteristics; (2) previous failures to show this involved problems of frequency range and task used; and (3) these differences in lexical access are related to perceptual fluency. We relate these findings to issues in the literature on event-related potentials (ERPs) and neurolinguistics.

Recent evidence suggests imitation is more developed in some cetaceans than the authors imply. Apart from apes, only dolphins have so far shown a grasp of what it is to imitate; moreover dolphins ape humans more clearly than do apes. Why have such abilities not been associated with the kind of progressive cultural complexity characteristic of humans?

We address the notion of integration of new memory representations and the potential dependence of this phenomenon on sleep, in light of recent findings on the lexicalization of spoken words. A distinction is introduced between measures tapping directly into the strength of the newly acquired knowledge and indirect measures assessing the influence of this knowledge on spoken word identification.

The most challenging objections to the Threat Simulation Theory (TST) of the function of dreaming include such issues as whether the competing Random Activation Theory can explain dreaming, whether TST can accommodate the apparently dysfunctional nature of post-traumatic nightmares, whether dreams are too bizarre and disorganized to constitute proper simulations, and whether dream recall is too biased to reveal the true nature of dreams. I show how these and many other objections can be accommodated by TST, and how several lines of new supporting evidence are provided by the commentators. Accordingly TST offers a promising new approach to the function of dreaming, covering a wide range of evidence and theoretically integrating psychological and biological levels of explanation.