معرفی
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. She leads the Spelke Lab, which conducts behavioral research on infants and preschool children to understand the origins of uniquely human cognitive capacities such as formal mathematics, symbolic representation, and object taxonomy.
- Education: B.A. in Social Relations from Radcliffe College (1971), Ph.D. in Psychology from Cornell University (1978).
- Professional Experience: Faculty positions at the University of Pennsylvania, Cornell University, MIT, and Harvard University since 2001.
Her research focuses on core knowledge systems in infancy, including understanding of objects, actions, people, places, number, and geometry. She collaborates with computational cognitive scientists to model infant cognition and with economists to apply findings to educational interventions. Her work integrates developmental, comparative, and cross-cultural perspectives.
Her recent publications span topics such as early math learning, social evaluation in toddlers, goal inference, and the interplay between language and conceptual development. Trends in her recent work include experimental field studies, interdisciplinary collaborations, and theoretical synthesis of core knowledge frameworks.
- National Academy of Sciences (USA), 1999
- American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1997
- National Academy of Sciences Prize in Psychological and Cognitive Sciences, 2014
- C.L. de Carvalho-Heineken Prize for Cognitive Sciences, 2016
- George A. Miller Prize, Cognitive Neuroscience Society, 2018
- Mentor Awards from APS and APA, 2021
Spelke has mentored numerous researchers and collaborated widely across disciplines. Her lab’s work is supported by major grants from the NSF and other institutions. She has pioneered the use of behavioral methods to study infant cognition and has been instrumental in translating cognitive science into educational practice.
She directs the Spelke Lab at Harvard, which investigates core cognitive systems through behavioral experiments with infants and young children. The lab explores how innate knowledge structures interact with experience to produce complex human cognition.
