In the animal literature, the concept of dominance usually links status in intermale encounters with differential reproductive success. Mazur & Booth effectively review the human literature correlating testosterone with intermale competition, but more profound questions relating this to male–female dynamics have yet to be addressed in research with humans.

Millikan's account of concepts is applicable to questions about concepts in nonhuman animals. I raise three questions in this context: (1) Does classical conditioning entail the possession of simple concepts? (2) Are movement property concepts more basic than substance concepts? (3) What is the empirical content of claiming that concept meanings do not necessarily change as dispositions change?

Van Gelder identifies the notion of a dynamical system with that of a quantitative system. According to an alternative view, a dynamical system is a state-determined system. This suggests a more profitable way to understand the roles of computation and dynamics in cognitive explanation.

The frame/content theory suggests that chewing was tinkered into speaking. A simple extrapolation of this approach suggests that syllable structure may have been tinkered into syntax. That would explain the widely noted parallels between sentence structure and syllable structure, and also the otherwise mysterious pervasiveness of the grammatical distinction between sentences and noun phrases.

Even in a theory corroboration context, attention to effect size is called for if significance testing is to be of any value. I sketch a Popperian construal of significance tests that better fits into scientific inference as a whole. Because of its many errors Chow's book cannot be recommended to the novice.

Pessoa et al. provide a valuable taxonomy of perceptual completion phenomena, but it is not yet clear whether these phenomena are mediated by one kind of neural mechanism or more. We suggest three possible neural mechanisms of long-range interaction to stimulate further perceptual and neurophysiological investigation of perceptual completion and filling-in.

It is argued that the notion of bridge locus is compatible with distributed representation and brain interconnectivity. Isomorphism is not a dogmatic condition on explanatory adequacy but a refutable hypothesis, superior to Dennett's proposed alternatives. The assumption of type-type neuro-perceptual correspondences is more parsimonious than multiple realizability.

Although our concepts of “Mama,” “milk,” and “mice” have much in common, the suggestion that they are identical in structure in the mind of the prelinguistic child is mistaken. Even infants think about objects as different from substances and appreciate the distinction between kinds (e.g., mice) and individuals (e.g., Mama). Such cognitive capacities exist in other animals as well, and have important adaptive consequences.

Testosterone is related to dominance, but in a broader sense than Mazur & Booth suggest. Dominance need not be competitive. It can arise from strong personal characteristics that produce admiration and deference in others. To understand the testosterone–dominance relationship fully, we must examine behaviors that affect ordinary social encounters. Baseline testosterone levels may be more important than testosterone changes in predicting everyday dominance.

The nature of the dynamical hypothesis in cognitive science (the DH) is further clarified in responding to various criticisms and objections raised in commentaries. Major topics addressed include the definitions of “dynamical system” and “digital computer”; the DH as Law of Qualitative Structure; the DH as an ontological claim; the multiple-realizability of dynamical models; the level at which the DH is formulated; the nature of dynamics; the role of representations in dynamical cognitive science; the falsifiability of the DH; the extent to which the DH is open; the role of temporal and implementation considerations; and the novelty or importance of the DH. The basic formulation and defense of the DH in the target article survives intact, though some refinements are recommended.

There is evidence of reciprocal connectivity, similarity of oscillatory responses to stimulation of multiple motor and somatosensory cortices, whole system oscillation, and short- latency responses to behavioral perturbation. These suggest that frame/content may be instantiated by overlapping neural populations, and that the genesis of frame oscillations may be profitably thought of as an emergent property of a distributed neural system.

Chow (1996) offers a reconceptualization of statistical significance that is reasoned and comprehensive. Despite a somewhat rough presentation, his arguments are compelling and deserve to be taken seriously by the scientific community. It is argued that his characterization of literal replication, types of research, effect size, and experimental control are in need of revision.

Although Pessoa, Teller & Noë make excellent points concerning the need for a mechanism of filling-in, they throw out the baby of neural specificity with the bathwater of isomorphism and the homuncular observer. The core act of perception is sensory processing by a stationary observer and does not require overt behavioral interaction with the environment. The complexity of intracortical interconnectivity does not preclude local specificity in the representation of higher-order stimulus properties.

Chow's defense of NHSTP is masterful. His dismissal of including effect sizes (ES) is misplaced, and his failure to discuss the additional practice of reporting proportions of variance explained (PVE) is an important omission. Reporting the results of inferential statistics will be greatly enhanced by including ES and PVE when results are first determined to be statistically significant.

The cyclic nature of speech production, as manifested in the syllabic organization of spoken language, is likely to reflect general properties of sensori-motor integration rather than merely a phylogenetic progression from mastication, teeth chattering, and lipsmacks. The temporal properties of spontaneous speech reflect the entropy of its underlying constituents and are optimized for rapid transmission and decoding of linguistic information conveyed by a complex constellation of acoustic and visual cues, suggesting that the dawn of human language may have occurred when the articulatory cycle was efficiently yoked to the temporal dynamics of sensory coding and rapid retrieval from referential memory.

To explain social learning without invoking the cognitively complex concept of imitation, many learning mechanisms have been proposed. Borrowing an idea used routinely in cognitive psychology, we argue that most of these alternatives can be subsumed under a single process, priming, in which input increases the activation of stored internal representations. Imitation itself has generally been seen as a “special faculty.” This has diverted much research towards the all-or-none question of whether an animal can imitate, with disappointingly inconclusive results. In the great apes, however, voluntary, learned behaviour is organized hierarchically. This means that imitation can occur at various levels, of which we single out two clearly distinct ones: the “action level,” a rather detailed and linear specification of sequential acts, and the “program level,” a broader description of subroutine structure and the hierarchical layout of a behavioural “program.” Program level imitation is a high-level, constructive mechanism, adapted for the efficient learning of complex skills and thus not evident in the simple manipulations used to test for imitation in the laboratory. As examples, we describe the food-preparation techniques of wild mountain gorillas and the imitative behaviour of orangutans undergoing “rehabilitation” to the wild. Representing and manipulating relations between objects seems to be one basic building block in their hierarchical programs. There is evidence that great apes suffer from a stricter capacity limit than humans in the hierarchical depth of planning. We re-interpret some chimpanzee behaviour previously described as “emulation” and suggest that all great apes may be able to imitate at the program level. Action level imitation is seldom observed in great ape skill learning, and may have a largely social role, even in humans.

Identifying objects as members of ontological domains activates category-specific processes. There is evidence that these processes include particular ways of “tracking” substances and could do all the “tracking” necessary for concept acquisition. There may be no functional need or evolutionary scenario for a general tracking capacity of the kind described by Millikan.

Mazur & Booth have shown an association between testosterone and dominance behavior, but the strength of the relationship is not given. In addition to being statistically significant, it is also necessary that testosterone account for a meaningful proportion of the variance; a multivariate model is probably necessary. A cautionary tale from the animal literature is related.

The frame/content theory of speech production is restricted to output mechanisms in the target article; we suggest that these ideas might best be viewed in the context of language production proceeding as a coordinated dynamical whole. The role of the medial premotor system in generating frames matches the important role it may play in the internally dependent timing of motor acts. The proposed coevolution of cortical architectonics and language production mechanisms suggests a significant divergence between primate and cetacean species corresponding to major differences in areal differentiation trends in cerebral cortex.

Pessoa, Thompson & Noë present compelling evidence in support of their central claims about the diversity of filling-in, but they embed those claims within a larger framework that rejects analytical isomorphism and uses the personal/subpersonal distinction to challenge the explanatory importance of filling-in. The latter views seem more problematic.