Rattling the cage and opening the door

I share with Poulin-Dubois and with Sabbagh, Koenig and Kuhlmeier the conviction that more research is needed on the mechanisms supporting selective social learning in infants and children. However, my plea is more specific: for research that tests domain-specific hypotheses about mechanism against domain-general hypotheses derived from other fields of cognitive science. Many, but not all, of these alternative hypotheses relate to domain-general mechanisms of attention.