Q.What does the notion of preparedness for learning mean?

Preparedness for learning refers to the biological limits, built by evolution, on what associations a given species can readily learn. …

The notion of preparedness for learning refers to the idea that every species carries inherent, genetically based biological constraints on what it is capable of learning. Members of different species differ enormously in their sensory capacities and their capacities for making responses, and the underlying associative mechanisms needed to form learning connections — whether stimulus-stimulus (S-S) associations, as in classical conditioning, or stimulus-response (S-R) associations, as in operant conditioning — also differ from species to species.

This means that the particular associations an organism can readily learn depend on the associative mechanism it happens to be genetically endowed with, or 'prepared' for. A kind of associative learning that is easy for apes or human beings to acquire may be extremely difficult, or even essentially impossible, for a cat or a rat to acquire — an organism can only really learn the associations for which it is biologically prepared, no matter how much training or reinforcement is applied to it. …