Abstract
Children’s extraordinarily long developmental period and their play and exploratory activities provide them with a greater opportunity to learn than is found in any other species. We argue that these developmental activities co-evolved with attentional, cognitive, and motivational biases to learn some types of information but not others. These biases support a universal cognitive development that results in the fleshing out of inherent skeletal knowledge that is organized around other people and social relationships (folk psychology), other species (folk biology), and the physical world (folk physics). In contrast, academic development, as in reading, writing, and arithmetic, occurs in some cultures and not others and largely in formal educational settings. The development of academic competencies does not come as easily to children as the development of folk abilities. Evolutionary educational psychology is focused on understanding how children’s evolved cognitive and motivational biases can help or hinder the learning of formal academic skills and provides a framework for designing educational interventions to facilitate this learning.
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Geary, D.C., Berch, D.B. (2016). Evolution and Children’s Cognitive and Academic Development. In: Geary, D., Berch, D. (eds) Evolutionary Perspectives on Child Development and Education. Evolutionary Psychology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-29986-0_9
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