Individual Differences in Developmental Plasticity May Result From Stochastic Sampling

The ability to adjust developmental trajectories based on experience is widespread in nature, including in humans. This plasticity is often adaptive, tailoring individuals to their local environment. However, it is less clear why some individuals are more sensitive to environmental influences than others. Explanations include differences in genes and differences in prior experiences. In this article, we present a novel hypothesis in the latter category. In some developmental domains, individuals must learn about the state of their environment before adapting accordingly. Because sampling environmental cues is a stochastic process, some individuals may receive a homogeneous sample, resulting in a confident estimate about the state of the world—these individuals specialize early. Other individuals may receive a heterogeneous, uninformative set of cues—those individuals will keep sampling. As a consequence, individual variation in plasticity may result from different degrees of confidence about the state of the environment. After developing the hypothesis, we conclude by discussing three empirical predictions