D
Development of Adaptations
David F. Bjorklund
Department of Psychology, Florida Atlantic
University, Boca Raton, FL, USA
Definition
The concept of adaptation is central to evolution-
ary psychology. Three types of developmental
adaptations are described: ontogenetic adapta-
tions, deferred adaptations, and conditional
adaptations. Adaptations develop and are based
on the highly plastic nature of infants’ and chil-
dren’s behavior/cognition/brains. The concept of
evolved probabilistic cognitive mechanisms is
introduced, defined as information-processing
mechanisms evolved to solve recurrent problems
faced by ancestral populations that are expressed
in a probabilistic fashion in each individual in a
generation, based on the continuous and bidirec-
tional interaction over time at all levels of organi-
zation, from the genetic through the cultural.
Early perceptual/cognitive/affective biases result
in behavior that, when occurring in a species-
typical environment, produce adaptive changes
in behavior and cognition, yielding stable and
adaptive outcomes. Examples from three
domains, the development of face processing in
infancy, prepared fears, and tool use, are provided
illustrating the development of adaptations via
evolved probabilistic cognitive mechanisms.
# Springer International Publishing AG 2016
T.K. Shackelford, V.A. Weekes-Shackelford (eds.), Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_2385-1
Introduction
Central to Darwin’s idea of evolution by natural
selection is the concept of adaptation, traits that
promote survival and reproductive success. Need-
less to say, the concept of adaptation is also central
to evolutionary psychology. Following Buss and
his colleagues (1998), “An adaptation may be
defined as an inherited and reliably developing
characteristic that came into existence as a feature
of a species through natural selection because it
helped to directly or indirectly facilitate reproduc-
tion during the period of its evolution” (Buss
et al. 1998, p. 535). Although mainstream evolu-
tionary psychologists quite understandably focus
on adaptations during adulthood – this is where
the mating, competition for social dominance, and
child-rearing take place, after all – adaptations
also characterize childhood. In fact, until rela-
tively recent times, childhood mortality was
about 50%, making childhood the “crucible for
natural selection” and thus likely the source of
many adaptations.
In addition to describing different types of
developmental adaptations in this entry, the devel-
opmental origins of adaptations will also be exam-
ined. Adaptations may be inherited, as claimed by
Buss and his colleagues in the aforementioned
quote, but they do not arise fully formed. Rather,
from a developmental perspective, adaptations
develop in a species-typical way when the organ-
ism experiences a species-typical environment
(Bjorklund 2015). Infants and young children
2 Development of Adaptations
are biased by natural selection to process some
information differently from other information,
and such biases contribute to the development of
adaptive species-typical behavior when children
grow up in species-typical environments. Also to
be discussed is how the plasticity of children’s
brains and cognition permits a range of potentially
adaptive outcomes, dependent on the specific
environments that children experience.
Adaptations of Infancy and Childhood
Not all adaptations are created equal. Evolution-
ary developmental psychologists have identified
three types of adaptations associated with infancy,
childhood, and adolescence: ontogenetic,
deferred, and conditional.
Ontogenetic Adaptations
Ontogenetic adaptations serve an adaptive func-
tion at a specific time in development and disap-
pear when they are no longer functional
(Bjorklund 1997). They function essentially to
keep the organism alive or to help it adjust to its
current environment rather than preparing it for
life in a future environment. Many aspects of
prenatal functioning are good examples of onto-
genetic adaptations. For instance, the yolk sac of
birds and the placenta and umbilical cord of mam-
mals serve obvious adaptive functions when the
animal is in the egg or the uterus but are discarded
after birth, being replaced by other adaptive phys-
iological functions for respiration and nutrition.
Newborns’ tendency to copy facial expressions of
adults (neonatal imitation, Meltzoff and Moore
1977) has been interpreted by some, not as a
“true” form of social learning, but as reflexive-
like behavior that serves to promote social inter-
action between an infant and its mother during a
time when the infant cannot control its own social
behavior. Support for this position comes from
evidence that copying a models’ facial expres-
sions decreases to chance levels by about 2 months
of age and that infants who displayed higher levels
neonatal imitation show better social interactions
with their mothers 3 months later (see Bjorklund
1997).
Ontogenetic adaptations are not limited to
infancy but can be seen in older children as well.
For example, preschool-age children consistently
overestimate their physical, social, and cognitive
abilities, thinking that they are smarter, stronger,
and more popular than they really are, and such
overestimation has some positive consequences.
For example, in one study, preschool children
who overestimated their imitative abilities had
higher verbal IQ scores than more accurate chil-
dren (Bjorklund et al. 1993), and preschool and
early school-age children who overestimated how
many items they had remembered on early mem-
ory trials had higher levels of memory and strat-
egy performance on later trials than more accurate
children (Shin et al. 2007). Children’s overly opti-
mistic opinions of their own abilities presumably
enhance their self-efficacy, causing them to persist
on tasks and in situations where a child with a
more accurate assessment of his or her less-than-
stellar functioning might quit. (See the entry on
“▶ Ontogenetic Adaptations,” in this volume.)
Deferred Adaptations
In contrast to ontogenetic adaptations are deferred
adaptations, which serve to prepare infants and
children for life as an adult or for the acquisition
of important skills that will be useful throughout
life (Hernández Blasi and Bjorklund 2003). Sex
differences are clear candidates for deferred adap-
tations, with boys and girls having different biases
that direct them to different activities that will
prepare them for life as an adult (or would have
prepared them for adult life in the environment of
evolutionary adaptedness). For example, in tradi-
tional environments, children learn much about
how to function as an adult through play with
age-mates. Play itself can be viewed as a deferred
adaptation, for both boys and girls. However,
although there are many similarities between the
play of boys and girls, there are also differences.
For example, boys engage in more vigorous
rough-and-tumble play than girls, which some
scholars have proposed prepared ancestral boys
for adult fighting. Both boys and girls engage in
fantasy play during childhood. Such play involves
counterfactual thinking, and Nielsen (2012) pro-
posed that fantasy play, along with imitation, was
Development of Adaptations
responsible in part for the evolution of the modern
human mind. However, there are sex differences
in the themes of play, with girls across cultures
engaging in more play-parenting and nurturing
roles, whereas boys’ play is usually centered on
aggression and domination themes. Such play, in
addition to helping children navigate social hier-
archies and develop relationships (which serve
both immediate and deferred functions), helps
children learn the roles they will likely play as
adults or would have played in ancient environ-
ments. These adaptations should not be viewed as
being impervious to experience or as producing
inevitable outcomes. Rather, they are better
viewed as biases that can be modified by experi-
ence, reflecting the high degree of neural, cogni-
tive, and behavioral plasticity characteristic of
childhood (see further discussion to follow).
Conditional Adaptations
Conditional adaptations can be thought of as a
type of deferred adaptation, but ones that empha-
size the importance of children’s plasticity and
sensitivity to local environments and children’s
ability to adjust their developmental trajectories
in anticipation of future contexts. Boyce and Ellis
(2005) defined conditional adaptations as
“evolved mechanisms that detect and respond to
specific features of childhood
environments – features that have proven reliable
over evolutionary time in predicting the nature of
the social and physical world into which children
will mature – and entrain developmental path-
ways that reliably matched those features during
a species’ natural selective history” (p. 290).
Perhaps the most studied topic from this per-
spective is the effect of early rearing environment
on the rate at which children (especially girls)
attain puberty and subsequent mating and parent-
ing strategies. For example, Belsky et al. (1991)
proposed that economic and social-relational
(e.g., parental warmth, dependability) conditions
during the first 5–7 years of life are good pre-
dictors of subsequent environments and direct
children to develop either a “fast” (early attain-
ment of puberty, early sexual debut, relatively
little investment in partners or children) or a
“slow” (later attainment of puberty, delayed
3
sexual activity, greater investment in partners
and children) life history strategy. Although fol-
lowing a fast life history strategy may be seen as
maladaptive from a societal or mental-health per-
spective, it may be adaptive from a biological/
evolutionary perspective, or would have been for
our ancestors. Children growing up in harsh and
unpredictable environments may be better served
by reaching maturity early, not depending on
long-term support from mates, and having a
greater number of children in whom they invest
relatively little (i.e., a “quantity vs. quality”
approach). The opposite pattern would likely be
adaptive for children growing up in supportive,
predictable, and high-resource homes. More than
two decades of research has generally confirmed
this hypothesis (see Ellis et al. 2009, 2012),
highlighting the importance of developmental
plasticity as a function of early rearing conditions.
Such adaptive plasticity is even found before
birth, with researchers reporting that prenatal
experiences can influence postnatal taste prefer-
ences, caloric metabolism, and attachment pat-
terns (see Gluckman and Hanson 2005). As Del
Giudice (2012, p. 1615) suggests, “The develop-
ing fetus can use this information as a ‘forecast’ of
the environmental conditions it will eventually
face after birth, and start adjusting its physiolog-
ical and behavioral profile to match the require-
ments of the world it will probably encounter.”
Although the concepts of ontogenetic,
deferred, and conditional adaptations provide
valuable ways for thinking about how natural
selection may have operated over the life cycle
and how contemporary children are prepared by
natural selection at different points in their devel-
opment, the distinctions are not always clear-cut.
Moreover, even if an adaptation does prepare a
child for adulthood, for example, it also likely
provides some immediate benefit. For instance,
most forms of social play help children learn
how to navigate social hierarchies, settle disputes,
and solve problems, all great preparation for adult
life. However, the same social play also helps
children deal with their immediate environment,
and similar arguments could be made for some
ontogenetic and conditional adaptations. For
example, although certain aspects of attachment
4 Development of Adaptations
seem clearly well suited to foster a child’s imme-
diate survival, individual differences in
attachment-related behaviors may help children
anticipate future environments, as proposed by
Belsky and his colleagues.
What Are Psychological Adaptations
Made Of?
Unlike adaptations such as an umbilical cord or an
opposable thumb, there are no easily identifiable
physical manifestations for psychological adapta-
tions. Evolutionary psychologists have proposed
that what underlie psychological adaptations are
evolved cognitive mechanisms – information-
processing mechanisms shaped by natural selec-
tion over evolution to solve recurrent problems
faced by our ancestors associated with reproduc-
tion and survival. According to Tooby and
Cosmides (1992, p. 277), evolved cognitive
mechanisms “in interaction with environmental
input, generate manifest behavior. The causal
link between evolution and behavior is made
through psychological mechanisms.” Such mech-
anisms are described as being modular, consisting
of domain-specific cognitive abilities that evolved
in response to specific recurrent adaptive
problems.
One problem that some developmental psy-
chologists have with the concept of evolved cog-
nitive mechanisms is the implication of genetic
determinism – such mechanisms are perceived as
reflecting innate processes that are activated at
appropriate times and in specific contexts to pro-
duce adaptive outcomes, leaving little room for
the role of experience in shaping adaptive pheno-
types. Although mainstream evolutionary psy-
chologists rightly chafe at the label “genetic
determinist,” the standard notion of evolved cog-
nitive mechanism fails to capture the substantial
role of plasticity that is seen in the development of
adaptations. In response, Bjorklund et al. (2007)
proposed the concept of evolved probabilistic
cognitive mechanism, defined as
information-processing mechanisms that have
evolved to solve recurrent problems faced by ances-
tral populations; however, they are expressed in a
probabilistic fashion in each individual in a gener-
ation, based on the continuous and bidirectional
interaction over time at all levels of organization,
from the genetic through the cultural. These mech-
anisms are universal, in that they will develop in a
species-typical manner when an individual experi-
ences a species-typical environment over the course
of ontogeny (p. 22).
Evolved probabilistic cognitive mechanisms
share most features with evolved cognitive mech-
anisms as mainstream evolutionary psychologists
define them; the major difference being that a
cognitive mechanism’s expression is explicitly
probabilistic, dependent upon bidirectional inter-
actions between all levels of the organism-
environment system. From this perspective, what
are inherited are perceptual/cognitive/behavioral
biases or dispositions that interact with a child’s
environment, producing a pattern of, usually
adaptive, thinking or behavior. Children are sen-
sitive to specific types of information at particular
times in development, resulting in a
choreographed dance between gene-influenced
neural maturation and species-typical experience.
This is why most members of a species, be they
monkeys, geese, or humans, grow up to be much
alike one another – they inherit both a species-
typical genome and a species-typical environ-
ment. However, because of the high level of neu-
ral plasticity of infants and children,
developmental outcomes are not predetermined
but can vary, often in adaptive ways, as a result
of variations in early experiences. Such sensitivity
to early experiences and the ability to modify
one’s developmental trajectory are critical for a
species, such as humans, who live in a vast range
of both physical and social environments. From
this perspective, evolved probabilistic cognitive
mechanisms are not viewed as encapsulated mod-
ules, but rather as emerging from initial perceptual
and information-processing biases in interaction
with species-typical environments. Thus, evolved
probabilistic cognitive mechanisms, and the adap-
tations they underlie, develop, with the eventual
form of an adaptation being dependent upon a
history of experience.
The following sections provide some examples
of how evolved probabilistic cognitive
Development of Adaptations
mechanisms may develop in the domains of infant
face perception, prepared fears, and tool use, lead-
ing to adaptive outcomes. For a more in-depth
discussion, please see Bjorklund (2015).
Infants’ Development of Face Processing
For a social species such as ours, with infants who
are highly dependent on adult care, few stimuli
can be of more significance than the human face.
Newborns begin life with perceptual biases that
attract them to faces, and they give special pro-
cessing priority to faces. For example, shortly
after birth, neonates (1) show a bias to look at
face-like stimuli (e.g., schematic stimuli with
two dots placed over a single dot within a headlike
figure vs. when the dots in the figure are inverted);
(2) are especially attentive to faces with eyes open
and gazing at them; (3) look longer at right-side-
up versus inverted faces, but only when they can
see the eyes; (4) spend more time looking at their
mothers’ faces than at faces of other women; and
(5) discriminate between human and nonhuman
faces (see Bjorklund 2015). This pattern does not
necessarily mean that newborns understand the
conceptual meaning of faces. Rather, faces appear
to have certain perceptual features that attract
young infants’ attention, including movement
and areas of high contrast, such as eyes. By 3 or
4 months, infants show a bias to attend to curvi-
linear stimuli and vertically symmetrical stimuli
(i.e., the right and left sides of a stimulus are
symmetrical) and have biases to attend to “top-
heavy” stimuli (i.e., up-down asymmetry), with
this bias being found even in newborns (see
Bjorklund 2015).
Infants’ abilities to discriminate among faces
improve over the first 5 or 6 months of life and
become especially good for the types of faces they
see on a regular basis. For example, at 6 months of
age, infants are able to discriminate between
upright and upside-down faces of both humans
and monkeys (Pascalis et al. 2002). By 9 months,
infants are increasingly able to discriminate
between human faces but now process upright
monkey faces no differently than inverted mon-
key faces (Pascalis et al. 2002), reflecting more
5
specialized processing with experience. Similarly,
infants are better able to distinguish among the
more-familiar females faces than the less-familiar
male faces, unless fathers are the primary care-
takers. According to Pascalis and his colleagues
(2002, p. 1321), “the ability to perceive faces
narrows with development, due in large measure
to the cortical specialization that occurs with
experience viewing faces. In this view, the sensi-
tivity of the face recognition system to differences
in identity among the faces of one’s own species
will increase with age and with experience in
processing those faces.”
A similar pattern of development is found for
infants’ ability to tell the difference between faces
of people of their own race versus those of another
race (the other-race effect). For instance, in one
study (Kelly et al. 2007), 3-month-old Caucasian
infants were able to discriminate adult faces from
among four ethnicities (African, Middle Eastern,
Chinese, Caucasian). By 6 months, infants were
able to distinguish between Chinese and Cauca-
sian faces but not between African or Middle
Eastern faces, and at 9 months, they performed
greater than chance only for the Caucasian faces.
That experience with specific classes of faces was
the primary reason for the development of the
other-race effect is demonstrated by research that
exposed infants to photos of faces from other
races or other species and reported subsequent
abilities to discriminate “foreign” as well as
same-race (or same species) faces (e.g., Anzures
et al. 2012). Thus, infants are initially able to
make discriminations equally well for faces of
different species, sexes, and ethnicities, but with
experience, their processing narrows, increasing
their ability to discern differences among faces
they see regularly, whereas they become relatively
less facile making discriminations among faces
they see less frequently.
Newborns seem to know nothing about faces,
per se, although they are attracted to and process
more efficiently lower-level features that happen
to be associated with faces. With experience, they
become increasingly able to discriminate faces,
especially those from groups of individuals with
which they regularly interact (humans, women,
members of their own race), while at the same
6 Development of Adaptations
time reducing their ability to process the types of
faces they encounter only occasionally. Yet,
infants retain enough plasticity that developmen-
tal trajectories can be modified, permitting Cau-
casian infants, for example, to maintain (or regain)
their ability to differentiate between faces from a
different race or even a different species.
Developing Prepared Fears
There seem to be some things that infants fear, or
show heighten levels of distress for, with little or
no previous experience. These include loss of
support and loud noises. Other fears seem to
develop somewhat later but appear to be nearly
universal, including fear of snakes and spiders.
But do people actually have an innate fear of
snakes or, like the processing of faces, do initial
perceptual bias make acquiring such fears more
likely?
Much as rats seem prepared to associate nausea
with previously eaten food, monkeys that initially
show no fear of snakes are more likely to respond
fearfully after watching another monkey respond
with fright to a snake than to a rabbit or a flower
(Cook and Mineka 1989). Research indicates that
adults, children, and infants identify snakes (and
spiders) more quickly from an array of flowers
than vice versa (see LoBue 2013). Such biases
seem to extend to sounds as well. For example,
in one study, 9-month-old infants were more
attentive to evolutionarily fear-relevant sounds
(e.g., crackling fire, hissing snake) than to modern
fear-relevant (e.g., tires screeching, bomb explod-
ing) or pleasant (e.g., Beethoven or rock-and-roll
music, horse neighing) sounds (Erlich et al. 2013).
Other research shows that people more easily
acquire fear responses for evolutionarily relevant
objects, such as snakes, than for objects that may
be more dangerous in contemporary environ-
ments, such as guns, knives, and automobiles.
Yet, rather than being innately fearful of snakes
and other evolutionarily relevant stimuli, it seems
that humans (and monkeys) have a tendency to
learn to associate such stimuli with fearful
responses. For instance, in one study (DeLoache
and LoBue 2009), 7- to 9-month-old infants and
14- to 16-month-old toddlers viewed videos of
snakes and other animals (rhinoceroses, giraffes).
Although the children initially displayed no fear
of the snakes (in fact, infants and young children
without previous negative experience with spiders
and snakes are often highly interested in these
animals, see LoBue 2013), when they saw short
video clips of snakes and other animals paired
with either a fearful or happy voice, they looked
longer at the snakes when listening to the fearful
voice than the happy voice. There was no differ-
ence in looking time to the two voices when they
watched videos of other animals. Similar patterns
were reported for infants with respect to angry/
fearful faces: infants more readily identified
images of angry faces than happy faces (LoBue
and DeLoache 2010), and 11-month-old girls
more easily associated a spider or snake with an
image of a fearful face than an image of a happy
face (Rakison 2009).
It seems highly unlikely that infants enter
world fearing snakes, spiders, or angry/fearful
faces. Rather, such fears are learned, as much as
fear for other stimuli is learned. However, primate
infants appear to possess perceptual biases
increasing the probability that fearful responses
to these evolutionarily relevant stimuli will be
learned.
Children as Tool Users
All animals must learn to deal with objects in their
physical world, but many, perhaps most, of the
objects that humans encounter are cultural arti-
facts, things made by people for a specific pur-
pose. One large category of cultural artifacts is
tools, devices used for “doing work” or solving
specific problems. As soon as infants have suffi-
cient motor dexterity, they begin to manually
explore objects (“What can the object do?”), dis-
covering their affordances (i.e., functional rela-
tionships between objects and the environment)
along the way. This is followed beginning around
9-months of age by manual play (“What can I do
with the object?”) (Belsky and Most 1981).
Although estimates vary, approximately
one-third of preschool-aged children’s activity
Development of Adaptations
involves playing with objects, with similar values
being reported for children in hunter-gatherer
societies (Bock 2005).
One purported purpose of object play is to
allow children to discover the affordances of
objects, which may facilitate subsequent tool
use. For example, researchers reported that 5-
and 6-year-old children were more likely to appro-
priately modify a tool (bend a pipe cleaner so it
can be used as a hook) when they were given the
chance to explore the properties of the object
beforehand, in conjunction with observing a
model using the tool, than children not permitted
to manipulate the materials (Cutting et al. 2014).
In other research, Gredlein and Bjorklund (2005)
measured the amount of object-oriented play in
3-year-old children during a free-play session, and
then, in a separate session, assessed children’s
ability to select and use a proper tool to retrieve
an out-of-reach toy. They reported that boys
performed the tool-retrieval task better than girls
(although girls performed comparably after a sim-
ple hint) and that there was a positive correlation
(r = 0.59) between the amount of object-oriented
play during the previous free-play sessions and
performance on the tool-retrieval task for boys,
but not for girls, causing Gredlein and Bjorklund
(2005) to suggest that boys may be more sensitive
to such environmental experiences than girls.
Infants and young children are not only moti-
vated to interact with objects, but early in devel-
opment, they learn that an artifact that is used to
solve a problem was in fact designed for a specific
function, referred to as the design stance. Children
acquire the design stance for new tools relatively
early. For example, when shown a new object and
told of its function (e.g., a boxlike object used for
catching bugs), 3-year-old children are less likely
to see an alternative use for the object (e.g.,
collecting raindrops), associating it with its origi-
nally designed purpose. Their prior knowledge of
what spoons are “for” resulted in what is referred
to as functional fixedness, a lack of flexibility
when it comes to using a familiar tool. Functional
fixedness is generally thought of as a “mental
block” that hinders effective problem solving.
However, the design stance, though sometimes
resulting in overly rigid behavior, more typically
7
results in adaptive outcomes. By identifying what
a particular artifact is “for,” children (and adults)
can more efficiently use tools that were in fact
designed for a specific purpose.
Children’s biases to manipulate objects, to dis-
cover their affordances, and their early design-
stance orientation are associated with social-
learning abilities in acquiring proper tool use.
From at least 3 years of age, children readily
learn how to use novel tools from watching
models (e.g., Flynn and Whiten 2008). In fact,
preschool children tend to copy all behaviors
associated with a model, whether relevant or not,
which has been referred to as overimitation. Chil-
dren assume that all of a model’s behavior are
normative and assume (usually correctly) that
someone would not purposefully perform unnec-
essary actions.
Effective tool use in humans is nearly inevita-
ble, but it is not based on an innate “tool-use”
adaptation unique to our species. Rather, infants
have biases to manipulate objects, with the pur-
pose of both seeing what objects can do
(exploration) and what they can do with the
objects (play). In the process, they discover
affordances of the objects and develop action
plans for using these objects. As children become
able to mentally represent objects, their general
tendency to see purpose in the objects and events
in the world make it increasingly likely that they
will learn to use objects as culturally prescribed.
This is further facilitated by social-learning biases
that result in children viewing the actions of others
as normative and worthy of often precise
imitation.
Conclusion
The concept of adaptation is central to evolution-
ary psychology. However, due to the high levels
of children’s behavioral, cognitive, and neural
plasticity, the final form (most) adaptations take
will depend on the early and continuous experi-
ence of children on their way to adulthood. Infants
and children with species-typical genomes pos-
sess low-level perceptual or cognitive biases or
abilities, which, in interaction with their
8 Development of Adaptations
environment, lead most children to process effec-
tively faces from their own species or ethnic
group, to acquire fearful responses to specific
evolutionarily relevant stimuli, or to develop a
facility with tools.
Although the examples provided here may
more easily fit the definition of evolved probabi-
listic cognitive mechanisms than others, the pro-
cess is a general one, reflecting how many
adaptive behaviors and cognitions are acquired
and have been acquired over the course of
human evolution. For example, there are a number
of low-level perceptual and cognitive traits that
underlie social relations in infancy, in addition to
the face-processing mechanisms discussed earlier.
These include neonatal imitation, discussed pre-
viously as an ontogenetic adaptation, a bias to
attend to biological motion, and baby-like facial
features that promote caregiving. Similarly, the
social-learning biases that foster rapid acquisition
of tool use via observation are preceded by more
basic abilities such as infants viewing others as
intentional agents – individuals whose actions are
performed to achieve some goal (Tomasello 2009)
and are reflected by the development of perspec-
tive taking, social referencing, and shared
attention.
From the current perspective, evolutionary
adaptations are emergent properties, arising from
low-level perceptual and cognitive biases, with
children themselves playing an active role in
these adaptations’ development (and evolution),
through continuous interaction with their physical
and social environments.
Cross-References
▶ Adaptation
▶ Adaptation and Natural Selection
▶ Adaptive Plasticity
▶ Deferred Adaptations
▶ Development
▶ Evolutionary Developmental Psychology
▶ Face and Object Recognition
▶ Fast versus Slow Strategies
▶ Imitation
▶ Life History Strategies
▶ Life History Theory
▶ Male and Female Development
▶ Neonatal Imitation
▶ Ontogenetic Adaptations
▶ Play
▶ Play and Tool Use
▶ Play Fighting in Boys
▶ Sex Difference in Play Styles
▶ Tool Play
▶ Universal Human Fears
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