ArticleAnnual review of developmental psychology2020
The Origins of Social Knowledge in Altricial Species.
Article in Annual review of developmental psychology, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Guidelines for assessing maternal cardiovascular physiology during pregnancy and postpartum.American journal of physiology. Heart and circulatory physiology · 2024Guideline
- Dopamine dynamics underlying maternal motivation and reward.Neuroscience research · 2025Review
- Cooperative Breeding as a Likely Early Catalyst of Human Evolution.Evolutionary anthropology · 2025Review
- "Age of risk" shapes simpler multimodal communication in the juvenile plains zebra (Equus quagga).Communications biology · 2025Article
- Helpless infants are learning a foundation model.Trends in cognitive sciences · 2024Review
- The Desirable Dad Hypothesis: Male Same-Sex Attraction as the Product of Selection for Paternal Care via Antagonistic Pleiotropy.Archives of sexual behavior · 2024Article
- Revisiting the musical reminiscence bump: insights from neurocognitive and social brain development in adolescence.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- A Developmental Social Neuroscience Perspective on Infant Autism Interventions.Annual review of developmental psychology · 2023Article
- Imprinted genes and the manipulation of parenting in mammals.Nature reviews. Genetics · 2023Review
- Dynamic developmental changes in neurotransmitters supporting infant attachment learning.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2023Review
- Maternal antibiotics disrupt microbiome, behavior, and temperature regulation in unexposed infant mice.Developmental psychobiology · 2022Article
- Leveraging Social Networks for the Assessment and Management of Neurological Patients.Seminars in neurology · 2022Review
- The many functions of vocal learning.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Human infants are altricial, born relatively helpless and dependent on parental care for an extended period of time. This protracted time to maturity is typically regarded as a necessary epiphenomenon of evolving and developing large brains. We argue that extended altriciality is itself adaptive, as a prolonged necessity for parental care allows extensive social learning to take place. Human adults possess a suite of complex social skills, such as language, empathy, morality, and theory of mind. Rather than requiring hardwired, innate knowledge of social abilities, evolution has outsourced the necessary information to parents. Critical information for species-typical development, such as species recognition, may originate from adults rather than from genes, aided by underlying perceptual biases for attending to social stimuli and capacities for statistical learning of social actions. We draw on extensive comparative findings to illustrate that, across species, altriciality functions as an adaptation for social learning from caregivers.
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