ABSTRACT
The early years of a human life span are reserved for an apprenticeship on how to cope with the environment into which an individual is born. Before being drafted into adult service, we learn to differentiate between important and less important changes in our surroundings, as well as to vary our responses accordingly. One obvious advantage of reliance on learning and thinking, rather than on innate stimulus–response connections, for adjusting to or mastering our environment is that acquired skills are not immutable. Members of the human species are not limited by previous accomplishments in their ability to survive when moving to a new environment or when the old environment itself changes. Early learning can be overlaid by new learning. Casual observation as well as experimental investigations disprove the proverbial statement that an old dog cannot learn new tricks but nevertheless provide some support for the hypothesis of greater difficulty in such acquisitions. Adults anticipate problems in learning to understand a foreign tongue, and from the perspective of an English-speaking adult, Chinese children seem highly intelligent for having mastered such a difficult language. Indeed, it would not be surprising if evolution, which endowed early human years with a readiness to absorb, had its counterpart in the later years in reduced ability to meet a demand for radically different types of proficiencies.
