The target article proposes an error theory for religious belief. In contrast, moral beliefs are typically not counterintuitive, and some moral cognition and motivation is functional. Error theories for moral belief try to reduce morality to nonmoral psychological capacities because objective moral beliefs seem too fragile in a competitive environment. An error theory for religious belief makes this unnecessary.

In early hominins, there possibly was high selective pressure for the development of reciprocal mother and child vocalizations such as proposed by Falk. In this context, temporoparietal-prefrontal networks that participate in tasks such as working memory and imitation may have been strongly selected for. These networks may have become the precursors of the future language areas of the human brain.

Pickering & Garrod's (P&G's) model is an innovative and important step in the study of naturalistic language. However, the simplicity of its mechanisms for dialogue coordination may be overstated and the hypothesized direct priming channel between interlocutors' situation models is questionable. A complete specification of the model will require more investigation of the role of top-down inhibition among representations.

Although we are sympathetic to his central thesis about the illusion of will, having previously advanced a similar proposal, Wegner's account of hypnosis is flawed. Hypnotic behavior derives from specific suggestions that are given, rather than from the induction, of trance, and it can be observed in 90% of the population. Thus, it is very pertinent to the illusion of will. However, Wegner exaggerates the loss of subjective will in hypnosis.

In light of an historical obsession with human error, Krueger & Funder (K&F) suggest that social psychologists should emphasize the strengths of social perception. In our view, however, absolute levels of accuracy (or error) in any given experiment are less important than underlying processes. We discuss the use of the process-dissociation procedure for gaining insight into the mechanisms underlying accuracy and error.

The interactive-alignment model of dialogue provides an account of dialogue at the level of explanation normally associated with cognitive psychology. We develop our claim that interlocutors align their mental models via priming at many levels of linguistic representation, explicate our notion of automaticity, defend the minimal role of “other modeling,” and discuss the relationship between monologue and dialogue. The account can be applied to social and developmental psychology, and would benefit from computational modeling.

Atran & Norenzayan (A&N) survey a substantial body of theory and evidence on which there is broad agreement in the cognitive science of religion. Some parts of their argument (for instance, concerning the causes of costly commitment to religious beliefs) are more speculative and remain a focus of lively debate and further research.

The main issue addressed here concerns the central notion of a forward internal model, through which efficient control and planning are linked together and to the related online predictive error processing. The existence of such a model has strong implications in action production and may question Glover's model.

According to the view that humans are conscious automata, the experience of conscious will is illusory. Epistemic theories of causation, however, make room for causal will, planned behavior, and moral action.

Falk has much of interest to say on the evolution of mothering, but she fails to address the core issue of language evolution: how symbolism or structure evolved. Control of infants does not require either, and Falk provides neither evidence nor arguments supporting referential symbolism as a component of mother-infant interactions.

Which roles are played by subcortical pathways in models of cortical streams for visual processing? Through their thalamic relays, magnocellular (M) and parvocellular (P) projecting ganglion cells send complementary signals to V1, where their outputs are combined in several different ways. The synergic role of M and P cells in vision can be understood by estimating cell response entropy in all domains of interest.

Although motherese may facilitate language acquisition, recent findings indicate that not all aspects of motherese are necessary for word recognition and speech segmentation, the building blocks of language learning. Rather, exposure to input that has prosodic, phonological, and statistical consistencies is sufficient to jump-start the learning process. In light of this, the infant-directedness of the input might be considered superfluous, at least insofar as language acquisition is concerned.

Wegner's refutation of the notion of a conscious free will is addressed to a general reader. Despite a wide ranging and instructive survey and a conclusion acceptable to current psychological thinking, it is flawed by terminological confusions and lack of attention to relevant evidence and previous psychological approaches. It is suggested that psychology best drop the term will altogether.

Little is known about how to generate plausible new scientific ideas. So it is noteworthy that 12 years of self-experimentation led to the discovery of several surprising cause-effect relationships and suggested a new theory of weight control, an unusually high rate of new ideas. The cause-effect relationships were: (1) Seeing faces in the morning on television decreased mood in the evening (>10 hrs later) and improved mood the next day (>24 hrs later), yet had no detectable effect before that (0–10 hrs later). The effect was strongest if the faces were life-sized and at a conversational distance. Travel across time zones reduced the effect for a few weeks. (2) Standing 8 hours per day reduced early awakening and made sleep more restorative, even though more standing was associated with less sleep. (3) Morning light (1 hr/day) reduced early awakening and made sleep more restorative. (4) Breakfast increased early awakening. (5) Standing and morning light together eliminated colds (upper respiratory tract infections) for more than 5 years. (6) Drinking lots of water, eating low-glycemic-index foods, and eating sushi each caused a modest weight loss. (7) Drinking unflavored fructose water caused a large weight loss that has lasted more than 1 year. While losing weight, hunger was much less than usual. Unflavored sucrose water had a similar effect. The new theory of weight control, which helped discover this effect, assumes that flavors associated with calories raise the body-fat set point: The stronger the association, the greater the increase. Between meals the set point declines. Self-experimentation lasting months or years seems to be a good way to generate plausible new ideas.

Experimental studies are not representative of how badly people function. We study people under relatively innocuous conditions, where their self-interests are very low. In the real world, where people's self-interests are much higher, people are much worse a good deal of the time (some illustrations are cited). This is often “adaptive” for the perpetrators, but that doesn't make it “good” behavior. That people function so badly in our experiments, where self-interest is relatively minimal, is what is really terrifying.

The authors are working with a limited notion of religion. They have confined themselves to a view of it as superstition, “counterintuitive,” as they put it. What they have not seen is that faith does in a real sense involve a paradox in that it projects an impossibility as a methodological device, a fictive ploy, which in the best interpretation necessarily involves a commitment to the likelihood of self-sacrifice.

The design and interpretation of self-experimentation need to be integrated with existing scientific knowledge. Otherwise observations on oneself cannot make a creative contribution to the advance of empirical understanding.

We applaud the authors' basic message. We note that the negative research emphasis is not special solely to social psychology and judgment and decision-making. We argue that the proposed integration of null hypothesis significance testing (NHST) and Bayesian analysis is promising but will ultimately succeed only if more attention is paid to proper experimental design and implementation.

Falk's hypothesis is attractive and seems to be supported by data from primatology and language acquisition literature. However, this etiological narrative presents a fairly low degree of plausibility, the result of two epistemological fallacies: an implicit reliance on a unilinear model of causality and the explicit belief that ontogeny is homologous to phylogeny. Although this attempt to retrace the early emergence of prelinguistic capacities in hominins falls short of producing a compelling argument, it does call attention to an aspect of linguistic behavior which may indeed have evolved under the pressure of nurturing constraints.

To speak of “inferences,” “interpretations,” and so forth is just folk psychology. It creates new homunculi, and it is also implausible from a purely phenomenological perspective. Phenomenal volition must be described in the conceptual framework of an empirically plausible theory of mental representation. It is a non sequitur to conclude from dissociability that the functional properties determining phenomenal volition never make a causal contribution.