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“A learning instinct, as he[Peter Marler] meant it, isn’t an indiscriminate disposition to learn anything; it is an evolved disposition to acquire a given type of knowledge, such as songs (for birds) or language (for humans). A learning instinct not only targets a specific learning goal, it also provides the instinctive learner with appropriate perceptual and inferential mechanisms to extract the right kind of knowledge from the right kind of evidence.”
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“How do learning instincts take advantage of experience to produce mature cognitive mechanisms?”

Dan Sperber. “The Enigma of Reason: A New Theory of Human Understanding.”