Elizabeth spelke psychologist

It was amazing to get to speak with Dr. Elizabeth Spelke! She introduces herself modestly, but it is worth noting that she is a researcher with a laundry list of fabulous honors and awards and is currently the Marshall L. Berkman endowed chair at Harvard University.

Here is Dr. Spelke:

Indeed, she does study babies, but her work is far reaching to the core of human cognitive capacity.

Dr. Spelke is a researcher who has clearly been influential in the history of Psychology with her early ground-breaking work on intermodal perception in infants, her extensive efforts to understand the core cognitive abilities of infants, and her research on spatial awareness,  numeracy, and many other critical cognitive concepts.  She has not only made tremendous contributions as a researcher, but she also has worked directly with some of the most renowned figures of Psychology in the development of her career.

As an undergraduate she researched with Jerry Kagan (also a fantastic and influential figure in Psychology — and I hope you check out my conversation with him)! Her graduate work was with Eleanor Gibson ( a brilliant researcher that is perhaps best known by her work on the Visual Cliff, and is one of the tremendous minds in the field of Perception); along with Ulrich Neisser (another incredible person in Psychology, earning him the moniker “Father of Cognitive Psychology”); and others in the department at Cornell University at that time (e.g., Eleanor Gibson’s husband, J.J. Gibson was certainly no slouch as a contributor to Perception, himself).

One might further note Dr. Spelke’s early career  as a new faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania. As she began her career, she described support and mentorship from her intellectual engagement with many brilliant colleagues: Rochel Gelman, Randy Gallistel, Lila Gleitman, Henry Gleitman, David Premack, and others.

All of this experience and the stories she has, pertain  directly to inno

Professor, Department of Psychology
Harvard University
33 Kirkland St. Cambridge, MA 02138
Phone: 617-495-3876
Fax: 617-384-7944
[email protected]

“The Science of Gender and Science” transcript.
Link to “Cognitive Science in the Field” video.
Elizabeth Spelke’s New Yorker Profile.
Elizabeth Spelke’s New York Times Profile
Elizabeth Spelke’s Heineken Prize Profile

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Elizabeth Spelke is the Marshall L. Berkman Professor of Psychology at Harvard University and an investigator at the NSF-MIT Center for Brains, Minds and Machines. Her laboratory focuses on the sources of uniquely human cognitive capacities, including capacities for formal mathematics, for constructing and using symbols, and for developing comprehensive taxonomies of objects. She probes the sources of these capacities primarily through behavioral research on human infants and preschool children, focusing on the origins and development of their understanding of objects, actions, people, places, number, and geometry. In collaboration with computational cognitive scientists, she aims to test computational models of infants’ cognitive capacities. In collaboration with economists, she has begun to take her research from the laboratory to the field, where randomized controlled experiments can serve to evaluate interventions, guided by research in cognitive science, that seek to enhance young children’s learning.

Education:
Radcliffe College, 1967-1971. B.A. in Social Relations, 1971.
Yale University, 1972-1973.
Cornell University, 1973-1977. Ph.D. in Psychology, 1978.

Professional Experience:
Department of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania:  Assistant Professor, 1977-1981; Associate Professor with tenure, 1981-1986.
Department of Psychology, Cornell University:  Professor, 1986-1996.
Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT:  Professor, 1996-2001.
Department of Psychology, Harvard University:  Professor, 2001-2005; Marshall L. Berkman Professor of Psycholo

Spelke’s laboratory focuses on the sources of uniquely human cognitive capacities, especially young children’s prodigious capacities for fast and flexible learning. She studies these capacities by investigating their origins and growth in human infants and children, by considering human cognition in relation to the capacities of diverse nonhuman animals, by comparing the capacities of humans from diverse cultures, and then by collaborating with neuroscientists, computational cognitive scientists, and economists to probe how and why children learn in the ways they do. Current projects investigate: how infants and children (1) recognize objects, extrapolate object motions, and group objects into functional categories such as foods and tools; (2) recognize social agents, reason about their goal-directed actions, mental states, and social relationships, and use other people as sources of information about the world; (3) develop knowledge of natural number and arithmetic, and master number words and symbols; (4) represent space and reason about geometry; and (5) perceive, reason, and learn about the living world of plants and animals. The core of Spelke’s research uses behavioral methods and laboratory-based tasks to investigate the concepts and reasoning of infants, children and adults. Through collaborations with anthropologists, evolutionary biologists, linguists, cognitive neuroscientists, computer scientists, and economists, Spelke has extended her studies of human cognitive capacities to encompass a broader range of populations, settings, methods, and challenges. Her newest work asks whether children’s fast and flexible learning can be illuminated by, and contribute to, research in artificial intelligence; and whether insights into children’s learning can both inform, and grow from, research evaluating measures to enhance the education and development of children worldwide.

American cognitive scientist

Elizabeth Shilin SpelkeFBA (born May 28, 1949) is an American cognitive psychologist at the Department of Psychology of Harvard University and director of the Laboratory for Developmental Studies.

Starting in the 1980s, she carried out experiments on infants and young children to test their cognitive faculties. She has suggested that human beings have a large array of innate mental abilities. In recent years, she has made important contributions to the debate on cognitive differences between men and women. She defends the position that there is no scientific evidence of any significant disparity in the intellectual faculties of males and females.

Education and career

Spelke did her undergraduate studies at Radcliffe College of Harvard University with the child psychologistJerome Kagan. Her thesis studied attachment and emotional reactions in babies. She realized that she needed to have an idea of what babies really understood, and so began her lifelong interest in the cognitive aspect of child psychology.

She did her Ph.D. at Cornell with developmental psychologistEleanor Gibson, from whom she learned how to design experiments on young children.

Her first academic post was at the University of Pennsylvania, where she worked for nine years. Thereafter she moved first to Cornell, and then to MIT's Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. She has been a professor at Harvard since 2001.

Spelke was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1997. She was the recipient of the 2009 Jean Nicod Prize and delivered a series of lectures in Paris hosted by the French National Centre for Scientific Research. She was elected as a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy in 2015. In 2016 Spelke won the C.L. de Carvalho-Heineken Prize for Cognitive Sciences. Spelke was honored several times with the