The complexity of modern societies necessitates that children learn highly abstract material, such as mathematics, which often conflicts with behavioral goals that are innately motivating. For instance, children’s educational success is generally evaluated based on their individual achievements, while humans are motivated to learn by engaging in socially relevant behaviors. Additionally, science-related content typically requires higher-level abstract thinking to comprehend related concepts and perform the underlying cognitive processes, whereas humans evolved primarily to monitor and manipulate the physical environment by moving within it to execute foraging and hunting behaviors. Moreover, school systems inherently prescribe top-down strategies in which teachers transfer knowledge by providing instructions to guide students' knowledge acquisition. By contrast, humans evolved to learn through bottom-up processes motivated by the learner's internal drive to explore their physical and social environment. As a consequence, skeletal cognitive competencies that evolved throughout human history create a mismatch between why children are motivated to learn and how they are expected to learn. This review adopts an evolutionary perspective to examine how the interplay between students’ internal physiological and psychological adaptations and external instructional methods of modern educational systems impacts motivation and learning. Ultimately, the review offers suggestions on how to motivate the learning process by integrating self-determination theory principles into a dynamical systems framework.

现代社会的复杂性要求儿童学习高度抽象的材料，例如数学，这往往与天生的激励行为目标相冲突。例如，儿童的教育成功通常是根据他们的个人成就来评估的，而人​​类则通过参与与社会相关的行为来激励学习。此外，与科学相关的内容通常需要更高层次的抽象思维来理解相关概念并执行潜在的认知过程，而人类的进化主要是为了通过在物理环境中移动来执行觅食和狩猎行为来监控和操纵物理环境。此外，学校系统本质上规定了自上而下的策略，教师通过提供指导来指导学生获取知识来传授知识。相比之下，人类进化为通过自下而上的过程进行学习，这是由学习者探索其物理和社会环境的内在动力驱动的。因此，在整个人类历史中不断演变的骨骼认知能力造成了儿童学习动机与期望他们如何学习之间的不匹配。本综述采用进化的视角来研究学生的内部生理和心理适应与现代教育系统的外部教学方法之间的相互作用如何影响动机和学习。最终，该评论就如何通过将自我决定理论原则整合到动态系统框架中来激励学习过程提供了建议。