The notion of preparedness for learning implies that different species have specific biological constraints on their learning capacities. It is best understood as a continuum where, on one end, are those learning tasks or associations that are easy for members of a species to learn. On the other end are tasks for which members are not prepared at all and cannot learn.

In the middle of this continuum fall tasks for which members are neither prepared nor unprepared; they can learn such tasks, but only with great difficulty and persistence. The kind of associative learning an organism can easily acquire depends on the mechanism it is genetically endowed with. For instance, a learning task may be easy for apes or human beings but extremely difficult or impossible for cats and rats. It implies that one can learn only those associations for which one is genetically prepared.