Time and the decider.

Shadmehr and Ahmed's book is a welcome extension of optimal foraging theory and neuroeconomics, achieved by integrating both with parameters relating to effort and rate of movement. Their most persuasive and prolific data come from saccades, where times before and after decision are reasonably determinate. Skeletal movements are less likely to exhibit such tidy temporal organization.

Evolving resolve.

The broad spectrum revolution brought greater dependence on skill and knowledge, and more demanding, often social, choices. We adopt Sterelny's account of how cooperative foraging paid the costs associated with longer dependency, and transformed the problem of skill learning. Scaffolded learning can facilitate cognitive control including suppression, whereas scaffolded exchange and trade, including inter-temporal exchange, can help develop resolve.

Abstracting reward.

The costs of and returns from actions are varied and individually concrete dimensions, combined in heterogeneous ways. The many needs of the body also fluctuate. Making action selection efficiently track some ultimate goal, whether fitness or another utility function, itself requires representational abstraction. Therefore, predictive brains need abstract value representations.

Representing utility and deploying the body.

Comprehensive accounts of resource-rational attempts to maximise utility shouldn't ignore the demands of constructing utility representations. This can be onerous when, as in humans, there are many rewarding modalities. Another thing best not ignored is the processing demands of making functional activity out of the many degrees of freedom of a body. The target article is almost silent on both.

Cui bono? Selfish goals need to pay their way.

The target article falls short of explaining the phenomena, including motivational conflict, that it sets out to. The two main reasons for this are: (1) It is unclear in what sense goals are "selfish"; (2) We need an account of how selfish goals motivate people. If selfish goals are not in the replication business, then what is in it for them? And if they do not offer people something that they want, how do they ever influence what people do?

A map of where? Problems with the "transparency" dimension.

Transparency is a fundamental concept in the target article by Bentley et al. But the text gives cryptic, inconclusive and sometimes conflicting suggestions as to what transparency consists of. Consequently, it is insufficiently clear what the north-south axis of the map of collective behaviour actually represents, or how to order behaviours by transparency.

Gambling participation and problem gambling severity among rural and peri-urban poor South African adults in KwaZulu-Natal.

Poor South Africans are significantly poorer and have lower employment rates than the subjects of most published research on gambling prevalence and problem gambling. Some existing work suggests relationships between gambling activity (including severity of risk for problem gambling), income, employment status and casino proximity. The objective of the study reported here is to establish the prevalence of gambling, including at risk and pathological gambling, and the profile of gambling activities in two samples of poor South African adults living in a rural and a peri-urban community. A total of 300 (150 male, 150 female) adults in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa in communities selected using census data, completed the Problem Gambling Severity Index and a survey of socioeconomic and household information, and of gambling knowledge and activity. It was found that gambling was common, and-except for lottery participation-mostly informal or unlicensed. Significant differences between rural and peri-urban populations were found. Peri-urban subjects were slightly less poor, and gambled more and on a different and wider range of activities. Problem and at risk gamblers were disproportionately represented among the more urbanised. Casino proximity appeared largely irrelevant to gambling activity.

An eye for an eye: reciprocity and the calibration of redress.

General systems for reciprocity explain the same phenomena as the target article's proposed revenge system, and can explain other cooperative phenomena. We need more reason to hypothesise a specific revenge system. In addition, the proposed calculus of revenge is less sensitive to absolute magnitudes of revenge than it should be.

It's not just the subjects - there are too many WEIRD researchers.

A literature in which most data are outliers is flawed, and the target article sounds a timely alarm call for the behavioural sciences. It also suggests remedies. We mostly concur, except for arguing that the importance of the fact that the researchers themselves are mostly outliers has been underplayed. Improving matters requires non-Western researchers, as well as research subjects.

What to say to a skeptical metaphysician: a defense manual for cognitive and behavioral scientists.

A wave of recent work in metaphysics seeks to undermine the anti-reductionist, functionalist consensus of the past few decades in cognitive science and philosophy of mind. That consensus apparently legitimated a focus on what systems do, without necessarily and always requiring attention to the details of how systems are constituted. The new metaphysical challenge contends that many states and processes referred to by functionalist cognitive scientists are epiphenomenal. It further contends that the problem lies in functionalism itself, and that, to save the causal significance of mind, it is necessary to re-embrace reductionism. We argue that the prescribed return to reductionism would be disastrous for the cognitive and behavioral sciences, requiring the dismantling of most existing achievements and placing intolerable restrictions on further work. However, this argument fails to answer the metaphysical challenge on its own terms. We meet that challenge by going on to argue that the new metaphysical skepticism about functionalist cognitive science depends on reifying two distinct notions of causality (one primarily scientific, the other metaphysical), then equivocating between them. When the different notions of causality are properly distinguished, it is clear that functionalism is in no serious philosophical trouble, and that we need not choose between reducing minds or finding them causally impotent. The metaphysical challenge to functionalism relies, in particular, on a naïve and inaccurate conception of the practice of physics, and the relationship between physics and metaphysics.