{"title":"Metabolism and the mind-body problem.","authors":"Paul Thagard","doi":"10.1017/S0140525X26106116","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X26106116","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The authors argue convincingly that metabolic considerations are highly relevant to evaluating and generating models of cognition. However, they understate their relevance to the mind-body problem. Metabolic reasoning about energy consumption should be combined with other constraints of speed, space, and history, providing an alternative to multiple realizability and medium independence: coherent materialism.</p>","PeriodicalId":8698,"journal":{"name":"Behavioral and Brain Sciences","volume":"49 ","pages":"e480"},"PeriodicalIF":8.2,"publicationDate":"2026-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149103775","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Selfish reasons to be a meritocrat.","authors":"Mark Sheskin, Samuel G B Johnson","doi":"10.1017/S0140525X26105974","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X26105974","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The target article usefully distinguishes egalitarian outcomes from the motivations and processes that lead to them. They emphasize that egalitarian outcomes can result without egalitarian motivations. We suggest that this same approach can be applied to meritocratic outcomes.</p>","PeriodicalId":8698,"journal":{"name":"Behavioral and Brain Sciences","volume":"49 ","pages":"e444"},"PeriodicalIF":8.2,"publicationDate":"2026-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149103756","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Francesca Starita, Giorgio Li Pira, Giuseppe Di Pellegrino
{"title":"Beyond neurocentrism: situating cognition within the metabolic demands of the whole organism.","authors":"Francesca Starita, Giorgio Li Pira, Giuseppe Di Pellegrino","doi":"10.1017/S0140525X26106219","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X26106219","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>We reorient Haueis and Colaço's metabolic framework of cognitive modeling by drawing on neuroscientific evidence from animal motor control, reinforcement learning, and decision-making to show that cognition emerged to serve the metabolic demands of the whole organism, rather than those of the brain alone. We also illustrate the generative value of our reframing to model cognition in artificial systems.</p>","PeriodicalId":8698,"journal":{"name":"Behavioral and Brain Sciences","volume":"49 ","pages":"e479"},"PeriodicalIF":8.2,"publicationDate":"2026-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149103631","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Antonietta Alvarez-Hernandez, Jordan Theriault-Brown
{"title":"From \"neural activity\" to \"neural activities\": a metabolic framework cultivates an integrative neuroscience by forcing a reexamination of foundational assumptions.","authors":"Antonietta Alvarez-Hernandez, Jordan Theriault-Brown","doi":"10.1017/S0140525X2610627X","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X2610627X","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Haueis and Colaço avoid referencing \"neural activity,\" instead of speaking \"neural activities\". This subtlety speaks to a strength of their framework: Their metabolically oriented account helps bypass abstractions and stimulus-response assumptions endemic to traditional neuroscience paradigms. We highlight two advantages of this pivot to \"neural activities,\" and how they pave the way for a unified, metabolically grounded, systems neuroscience.</p>","PeriodicalId":8698,"journal":{"name":"Behavioral and Brain Sciences","volume":"49 ","pages":"e454"},"PeriodicalIF":8.2,"publicationDate":"2026-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149103660","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Metabolic constraints may both help and hinder cognitive models.","authors":"Jake R Embrey","doi":"10.1017/S0140525X2610613X","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X2610613X","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Constraining cognitive models based on the metabolic realities of the brain is a laudable goal. However, imposing strong constraints on nascent theories risks prematurely discarding potentially productive models. Furthermore, despite models of cognitive fatigue being an intuitive test case for Haueis and Colaço's approach, the strictly medium-independent nature of non-resource models (e.g., opportunity cost models) highlights some limits to the proposed approach.</p>","PeriodicalId":8698,"journal":{"name":"Behavioral and Brain Sciences","volume":"49 ","pages":"e458"},"PeriodicalIF":8.2,"publicationDate":"2026-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149103620","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Metabolism beyond the neuron: system-level constraints on cognitive modelling.","authors":"Olivier Penacchio, Ana Clemente","doi":"10.1017/S0140525X26106232","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X26106232","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Survival depends on efficient energy management, and neural systems are highly metabolically demanding biological structures. We fully endorse Haueis and Colaço's call to integrate metabolism as a fundamental constraint on cognitive modelling. However, by focusing primarily on the neuronal level, their analysis underplays system-level approaches that have already incorporated metabolic constraints into successful and predictive accounts of cognition.</p>","PeriodicalId":8698,"journal":{"name":"Behavioral and Brain Sciences","volume":"49 ","pages":"e472"},"PeriodicalIF":8.2,"publicationDate":"2026-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149103737","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Cédric Sueur, Elodie F Briefer, Jean-Louis Deneubourg
{"title":"Egalitarian decision-making without equality: Lessons from need-based leadership and consensus in animal societies.","authors":"Cédric Sueur, Elodie F Briefer, Jean-Louis Deneubourg","doi":"10.1017/S0140525X26105779","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X26105779","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Drawing on formal models and empirical studies of collective decision-making in animal groups, we show that egalitarian systems can emerge and remain stable despite persistent individual inequalities in needs, information, and social position. Egalitarianism is best understood as a dynamic regulation of influence under heterogeneous conditions, where leadership is conditional, distributed, and reversible rather than fixed or coercive.</p>","PeriodicalId":8698,"journal":{"name":"Behavioral and Brain Sciences","volume":"49 ","pages":"e446"},"PeriodicalIF":8.2,"publicationDate":"2026-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149103667","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Metabolic considerations are generic biological details without resource-rational analysis.","authors":"Brendan Fleig-Goldstein","doi":"10.1017/S0140525X26106281","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X26106281","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>H&C leave unanswered whether metabolic considerations (MCs) are merely one neglected type of biological detail that constrains cognitive models or a distinctive kind uniquely poised to do so. Their examples give little reason to believe the latter. If the former, a methodology built around MCs specifically - rather than neuroscientific facts generally - is unjustified unless embedded within resource-rational analysis.</p>","PeriodicalId":8698,"journal":{"name":"Behavioral and Brain Sciences","volume":"49 ","pages":"e460"},"PeriodicalIF":8.2,"publicationDate":"2026-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149103699","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Egalitarianism as hierarchy control: Predictive social minds and the evolution of anti-dominance institutions.","authors":"Sarfaraz K Niazi","doi":"10.1017/S0140525X26105925","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X26105925","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Stibbard-Hawkes and von Rueden redefine egalitarianism as a process rather than an outcome. We extend this framework by arguing that egalitarian societies represent cognitive-ecological equilibria in which evolved psychological systems regulate dominance hierarchies. The six identified processes correspond to distinct neurocognitive mechanisms for hierarchy suppression, interpretable as distributed strategies for managing hierarchical risk within predictive processing.</p>","PeriodicalId":8698,"journal":{"name":"Behavioral and Brain Sciences","volume":"49 ","pages":"e439"},"PeriodicalIF":8.2,"publicationDate":"2026-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149103645","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Deliberation and egalitarianism.","authors":"Ramon van der Does","doi":"10.1017/S0140525X26105962","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X26105962","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Stibbard-Hawkes and von Rueden highlight consensus-based decision-making as a key process underlying egalitarianism. I argue that this terminology remains unnecessarily imprecise and can be potentially misleading. In line with the authors' own argument, I underline the need to focus on <i>deliberation</i> instead and provide several reasons why this could further both the study of egalitarianism and that of deliberation.</p>","PeriodicalId":8698,"journal":{"name":"Behavioral and Brain Sciences","volume":"49 ","pages":"e449"},"PeriodicalIF":8.2,"publicationDate":"2026-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149103648","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}