The Schema Mechanism is intended to replicate key aspects of cognitive development during infancy.
It takes Piaget's theory of human development as a source of inspiration for an artificial learning mechanism, and it extends and tests Piaget's theory by seeing whether a specific mechanism that works according to Piagetian themes exhibits Piagetian abilities.
In 2001 and 2002, Drescher was a visiting fellow at the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University, which is directed by the American philosopher Daniel Dennett.
Following his work at Tufts, he wrote the 2006 book Good and Real: Demystifying Paradoxes from Physics to Ethics, in which he defends rigorously mechanistic materialism.
In this book, Drescher also provides treatments of the Prisoner's Dilemma and Newcomb's Problem to build a defense of the golden rule and Kant's categorical imperative which does not require that we posit anything beyond the physical world as understood by the natural sciences.