Design for learning: The case of chasing.

Often, mental development is viewed as resulting either from domain-general learning mechanisms or from highly specialized modules containing substantial innate knowledge. However, an evolutionary developmental perspective suggests that learning and specialization are not necessarily in opposition. Instead, natural selection can favor learning mechanisms that rely on information from the environment to constrict adaptive phenotypes, exploiting recurrent properties of fitness-relevant domains. Here we consider the possibility that early action understanding is centered on domain-specific action schemas that guide attention towards domain-relevant events and motivate learning about those domains. We examine chasing as a case study. We report studies (1) exploring the mechanisms that guide infants' attention to chasing events and (2) examining the inferences and judgments that children and adults make. We argue that these findings are consistent with the possibility that natural selection has built "islands of competence" in early action understanding that serve as kernels for future learning and development. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved)