ENVIRONMENT OF DEVELOPMENTAL ADAPTEDNESS

DEEP ETHOLOGY – DEVELOPMENT meets the ENVIRONMENT

We know that human cognitive abilities emerge during development as the brain and body (especially sensory systems) develop –SO, at a given stage of development, the perceived environment can be very different—it is always a compromise between the affordances of the environment and the stage in a person’s development.  You cannot interact with something that cannot be fully perceived or conceived, if at all.

I’m trying to reinforce the idea of “environment of developmental adaptedness.” Inspired by the principle in evolutionary theory of “environment of evolutionary adaptedness”[i]   The genetic programs for the earliest environments are relatively “open” … and one of my favorites is the effect on later cognition of early language experiences even when they are not consciously undertaken, such as speaking to infants long before their cognitive competence can start to understand words[ii] (although tones of voice are important (what does that tell you about performative speaking))  

SO, no surprise: Study finds screen time harms child’s ability to talk : “A study published in JAMA Pediatrics found that children ages between 18 and 36 months who spent more time looking at screens were less likely to hear adult words or engage in conversation with their parents. Researchers noted that the largest decreases were seen at 36 months, in which just one additional minute of screen time was associated with 6.6 fewer adult words, 4.9 fewer child vocalizations and 1.1 fewer turns in conversation.” (Full Story: HealthDay News (3/5)

[i] https://www.cep.ucsb.edu/environments-of-evolutionary-adaptedness-eea/  : ‘Many people think of the environment of evolutionary adaptedness (EEA) as the ecological and social conditions of a Pleistocene hunter-gatherer. But the EEA is not a specific place or time. It is the statistical composite of selection pressures that pushed the alleles coding for an adaptation to fixation. It is, therefore, an adaptation-specific concept, such that the EEA for one adaptation may be different from that for another. For example, the EEA for color vision consists of the conditions of terrestrial illumination, which have been relatively constant for hundreds of millions of years. In contrast, the EEA for male parental investment in humans, which involved hunting, pair-bonding, etc, is relatively recent, perhaps 2 million years.  //  The concept of the EEA is among the most important (and misunderstood) in evolutionary psychology. For a detailed discussion of why it is important, see: Tooby, J. & Cosmides, L. (1990). The past explains the present: Emotional adaptations and the structure of ancestral environments. Ethology and Sociobiology, 11, 375-424. (PDF)

[ii] “Children’s early language environment is crucial for their emerging language abilities …, which are in turn associated with later literacy skills …. For instance, children exposed to a large quantity of high-quality language input—longer utterances, higher grammatical complexity, more vocabulary diversity—have larger vocabularies …. In addition, children who are exposed to more child-directed speech early in development have faster language-processing abilities …, show larger vocabularies …, and have better language outcomes….” /// Critically, there are large individual differences in the quantity and quality of language input that children receive from their caregivers. This variation may be associated with the caregiver’s socioeconomic status …, a complex index of a family’s social and financial resources often based on parental education and/or income. Some studies using manual annotation of children’s in-home speech exposure report that parents from higher-SES backgrounds talk more and use richer language input with their children …. Such variations could be because of multiple contextual influences such as high parental stress and economic instability in low-SES families …. However, recent research has questioned whether variations in input quantity and quality are strictly associated with SES, because there also seems to be substantial variation in children’s language environments within each socioeconomic stratum…”. (excerpts from the Introduction by Fibla et al 2023)