Elizabeth S. Spelke

About

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.

Research topics

• Psychology
• Developmental psychology
• Sociology
• Cognitive science
• Computer Science
• World Wide Web
• Data science
• Neuroscience
• Cognitive psychology
• Demography

Selected publications

• What Babies Know

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2022 · 217 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract What do infants know, and how does the knowledge that they begin with prepare them for learning about the particular physical, cultural, and social world in which they live? Answers to this question shed light not only on infants but on children and adults in all cultures, because the core knowledge possessed by infants never goes away. Instead, it underlies the unspoken, commonsense knowledge of people of all ages, in all societies. By studying babies, researchers gain insights into in…

  DOI

• Online Developmental Science to Foster Innovation, Access, and Impact

  Trends in Cognitive Sciences · 2020 · 124 citations

  We propose that developmental cognitive science should invest in an online CRADLE, a Collaboration for Reproducible and Distributed Large-Scale Experiments that crowdsources data from families participating on the internet. Here, we discuss how the field can work together to further expand and unify current prototypes for the benefit of researchers, science, and society.

  PublisherDOI

• Across demographics and recent history, most parents sing to their infants and toddlers daily

  Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences · 2021 · 71 citations

  = 945). We found that most parents sing to their infant on a daily basis and the frequency of infant-directed singing is unrelated to parents' income or ethnicity. Two reliable individual differences emerged, however: (i) fathers sing less than mothers and (ii) as infants grow older, parents sing less. Moreover, the latter effect of child age was specific to singing and was not reflected in reports of the frequency of playing recorded music. Last, we meta-analysed reports of the frequency of inf…

  DOI

• Object permanence in newborn chicks is robust against opposing evidence

  arXiv (Cornell University) · 2024-02-22 · 36 citations

  preprintOpen access

  Newborn animals have advanced perceptual skills at birth, but the nature of this initial knowledge is unknown. Is initial knowledge flexible, continuously adapting to the statistics of experience? Or can initial knowledge be rigid and robust to change, even in the face of opposing evidence? We address this question through controlled-rearing experiments on newborn chicks. First, we reared chicks in an impoverished virtual world, where objects never occluded one another, and found that chicks sti…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Rapid emergence of a maths gender gap in first grade

  Nature · 2025-06-11 · 19 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• Sources of Mathematical Thinking

  NSF · $1.7M · 2004–2008

• Core Systems for Learning Mathematics

  NSF · $1.4M · 2014–2022

• NIH Grant R01HD02310326

  NIH · $456k · 2013

Frequent coauthors

• Stanislas Dehaene

  NeuroSpine Institute

  171 shared

• Véronique Izard

  Université Paris Cité

  143 shared

• Pierre Pica

  Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte

  136 shared

• Shari Liu

  Johns Hopkins University

  57 shared

• Moira R. Dillon

  New York University

  42 shared

• Tomer Ullman

  Harvard University

  34 shared

• Véronique Izard

  Université Paris Cité

  30 shared

• Brandon M. Woo

  Harvard University

  23 shared

Labs

• Spelke LabPI

Education

• Ph.D., Psychology

  Harvard University

  1984

• B.A., Psychology

  University of California, Berkeley

  1979

Awards & honors

• Phi Beta Kappa, 1971
• Sigma Xi, Cornell University 1978
• Fulbright-Hays Senior Research Fellowship, 1983
• McCandless Young Scientist Research Award, APA, 1984
• John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, 1989

Similar researchers at Harvard University

• Randy L. Bucknerh-268
• Daniel L. Schacterh-181
• Matthew K. Nockh-126