Developing adaptations

Abstract

The concept of adaptation is ubiquitous in psychology and plays a central role in evolutionary psychology. In this article I provide a different way of thinking about adaptations from an evolutionary developmental psychological perspective, more in line with the theorizing of developmental systems perspective than with mainstream evolutionary psychology. Adaptations develop and are based on the highly plastic nature of infants and children'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 bidirectional interaction over time at all levels of organization, from the genetic through the cultural. Early perceptual/cognitive/affective biases result in behavior that, when occurring in a species-typical (expectant) environment, produce continuous adaptive changes in behavior (and cognition), yielding stable (and adaptive) outcomes. Examples from two domains, the development of face processing in infancy and prepared fears, are provided illustrating the development of adaptations via evolved probabilistic cognitive mechanisms.