The Ontogeny of Competence

new graduate students waiting for first teaching assignment. Practically first sentence of APK to MJW, "What is your theory of learning?" MJW thought it an odd opening; APK did not. At a recent national meeting, after a paper session on the development of mate choice, someone stopped MJW and asked about her "feminist political agenda." MJW asked for clarification, not aware of having so grand thing as an agenda. The questioner said, "Well, it's just you keep asking the speakers what the animals were doing, what they could see or hear… you know… little stuff, stuff not related to mate choice. " The questioner had done a good job of characterizing the behavior she had seen, but perhaps did not have enough information to understand the underlying reason, the " agenda " as it were. Although we are interested in the big question of the process of development, we are also truly fascinated by the particulars of developmental systems. For us, development is in the details. As a result, we tend to ask concrete questions. Examples of such questions include the diet of study animals, the specifics of their housing, how often animals were observed, and most importantly, what King, & West Competence 3 animals do when humans say the animals are " choosing " or " preferring " or " interacting ". In this chapter, we discuss our approach to the study of development. The specific domain for our work has been birdsong. The study of bird song is often touted as a model system for the study of learning, maturation, and experience. While we do not dispute this general view, we will argue that the study of song learning has much more to offer by considering developmental particulars, as well as developmental contexts. The editors asked the contributors to this book to frame their individual scientific journeys in terms of their own life history and development. We puzzled about how to capture our journey. The strategy we chose, as introduced above, was to include brief notes about life in our laboratory over the years as we chronicle the course of our research. These notes were chosen because they capture or caricature distinctive features of our approach. We hope these notes shed a more personal light on our scientific style. The accuracy of the memories is about p < .10. The chapter contains four sections. First, we outline the …