ABSTRACT
Learning processes often play a major role in behavioral adaptation. A learned outcome of an organism-environment interaction depends, of course, upon adequate functioning of the sensory processes that allow the organism to experience the critical events of its world and the memory processes that store representations of experienced events and their relation to one another. The newborn of many species, including humans, are altricial, however. They are born with immature central nervous systems (CNS) and limited sensory and motor processes, relative to their adult counterparts. Consequently, there are serious constraints on the learning potential of such organisms. Indeed one of the remarkable features of altricial animals is the change in their learning capacity that occurs as their sensory systems and central nervous systems develop. As witnessed by the contributions to this volume and preceding ones (Kail & Hagen, 1977; Spear & Campbell, 1979), there has been and continues to be considerable interest in the ontogenesis of learning and memory processes by researchers studying both humans and nonhumans.
