Elizabeth Shilin Spelke
FBA (born May 28, 1949) is an American
cognitive psychologist at the Department of Psychology of
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of highe ...
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
Radcliffe College was a women's liberal arts college in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and functioned as the female coordinate institution for the all-male Harvard College. Considered founded in 1879, it was one of the Seven Sisters colleges and h ...
with the
child psychologist
Developmental psychology is the scientific study of how and why humans grow, change, and adapt across the course of their lives. Originally concerned with infants and children, the field has expanded to include adolescence, adult development ...
Jerome 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
Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to tea ...
with
developmental psychologist
Developmental psychology is the scientific study of how and why humans grow, change, and adapt across the course of their lives. Originally concerned with infants and children, the field has expanded to include adolescence, adult development ...
Eleanor Gibson
Eleanor Jack Gibson (7 December 1910 – 30 December 2002) was an American psychologist who focused on reading development and perceptual learning in infants. Gibson began her career at Smith College as an instructor in 1932, publishing her first ...
, from whom she learned how to design experiments on young children.
Her first academic post was at the
University of Pennsylvania
The University of Pennsylvania (also known as Penn or UPenn) is a Private university, private research university in Philadelphia. It is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and is ranked among the highest- ...
, where she worked for nine years. Thereafter she moved first to Cornell, and then to
MIT
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the m ...
's Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. She has been a professor at Harvard since 2001.
[Spelke, Elizabeth. Curriculum Vita df http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~lds/pdfs/spelkecv_mar07.pdf ]
Spelke was elected a Fellow of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (abbreviation: AAA&S) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, a ...
in 1997.
She was the recipient of the 2009
Jean Nicod Prize
The Jean Nicod Prize is awarded annually in Paris to a leading philosopher of mind or philosophically oriented cognitive scientist. The lectures are organized by the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique as part of its effort to promote int ...
and delivered a series of lectures in Paris hosted by the
French National Centre for Scientific Research
The French National Centre for Scientific Research (french: link=no, Centre national de la recherche scientifique, CNRS) is the French state research organisation and is the largest fundamental science agency in Europe.
In 2016, it employed 31,63 ...
. She was elected as a
Corresponding Fellow of the
British Academy
The British Academy is the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and the social sciences.
It was established in 1902 and received its royal charter in the same year. It is now a fellowship of more than 1,000 leading scholars s ...
in 2015. In 2016 Spelke won the
C.L. de Carvalho-Heineken Prize for Cognitive Sciences.
Experiments
The kind of experiments carried out at the Laboratory of Developmental Studies try to infer the cognitive abilities of babies by using the method of ''
preferential looking
Preferential looking is an experimental method in developmental psychology used to gain insight into the young mind/ brain. The method as used today was developed by the developmental psychologist Robert L. Fantz in the 1960s.
The Preferential ...
'', developed by
Robert Fantz
Robert Lowell Fantz (1925–1981) was an American developmental psychologist who pioneered several studies into infant perception. In particular, the preferential looking paradigm introduced by Fantz in the 1961 is widely used in cognitive devel ...
. This consists of presenting babies with different images and deducing which one is more appealing to them by the length of time their attention fixes on them.
For example, researchers may repeatedly show a baby an image with a certain number of objects. Once the baby is habituated, they present a second image with more or fewer objects. If the baby looks at the new image for a longer time, the researchers may infer that the baby can distinguish different quantities.
Through an array of similar experiments, Spelke interpreted her evidence to suggest that babies have a set of highly sophisticated, innate mental skills. This provides an alternative to the hypothesis originated by
William James
William James (January 11, 1842 – August 26, 1910) was an American philosopher, historian, and psychologist, and the first educator to offer a psychology course in the United States.
James is considered to be a leading thinker of the lat ...
that babies are born with no distinctive cognitive abilities but acquire them all through education and experience (see Principles of Psychology, 1890).
The debate on sex and intelligence
In 2005,
Lawrence Summers
Lawrence Henry Summers (born November 30, 1954) is an American economist who served as the 71st United States secretary of the treasury from 1999 to 2001 and as director of the National Economic Council from 2009 to 2010. He also served as pres ...
, then Harvard president, speculated over the preponderance of men over women in high-end science and engineering positions. He surmised that a statistical difference in the variance of innate abilities among male and female populations (male variance tends to be higher, resulting in more extremes) could play a role. His words immediately sparked a heated debate. Spelke was among the strongest critics of Summers, and in April 2005, she faced
Steven Pinker
Steven Arthur Pinker (born September 18, 1954) is a Canadian-American cognitive psychologist, psycholinguist, popular science author, and public intellectual. He is an advocate of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind.
...
in an open debate over the issue.
She declared that her own experiments revealed no difference between the mental capacities of male and female children ranging in age from 5 months to 7 years old.
References
External links
Harvard faculty profile of SpelkeSpelke lab websiteVideo (and audio) of conversation discussing some of her research with Spelkeand
Joshua Knobe
Joshua Michael Knobe (born 1974) is an American experimental philosopher, whose work ranges across issues in philosophy of mind and action and ethics. He is Professor of Cognitive Science and Philosophy at Yale University. He is known for his ...
on
Bloggingheads.tv
Bloggingheads.tv (sometimes abbreviated "bhtv") is a political, world events, philosophy, and science video blog discussion site in which the participants take part in an active back and forth conversation via webcam which is then broadcast on ...
*Margaret Talbot, ''The baby lab'', ''
The New Yorker
''The New Yorker'' is an American weekly magazine featuring journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry. Founded as a weekly in 1925, the magazine is published 47 times annually, with five of these issues ...
, Sep. 4, 2006. https://web.archive.org/web/20090122052520/http://www.newamerica.net/publications/articles/2006/the_baby_lab
{{DEFAULTSORT:Spelke, Elizabeth
American psychologists
American women psychologists
Women cognitive scientists
Developmental psychologists
Cognitive development researchers
Fellows of the Society of Experimental Psychologists
Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science
Jean Nicod Prize laureates
Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences
Winners of the Heineken Prize
Cornell University alumni
Radcliffe College alumni
Harvard University faculty
1949 births
Living people
Fellows of the Cognitive Science Society
Corresponding Fellows of the British Academy
American women academics
21st-century American women