Elizabeth Spelke

Elizabeth Spelke, born in 1949, is an American cognitive psychologist at Harvard University who directs the Laboratory for Developmental Studies. She studied at Radcliffe College with Jerome Kagan and earned her doctorate at Cornell under Eleanor Gibson, then worked at the University of Pennsylvania, Cornell and MIT before moving to Harvard in 2001. Using preferential looking, habituation and violation of expectation experiments, she argues that infants are born with a small set of core knowledge systems for representing objects, number, space, agents and social groups, and that language helps combine them. The view is debated: critics say looking-time results may reflect lower-level perceptual preferences or statistical learning. She also publicly disputed claims about innate sex differences in science ability. She won the Jean Nicod Prize in 2009 and the Heineken Prize for Cognitive Sciences in 2016.