Featured series 
Tag: Elizabeth Spelke
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Nation & World
When babies see people swap spit, they know what’s what
Infants deduce that people are in a close relationship if they witness interactions like kissing and taking bites of each other’s food.
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Nation & World
Research may provide the tools to create better schools
Harvard and MIT study reveals that cognitive science field experiments are critical to understanding human learning and education.
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Nation & World
Muting the Mozart effect
Though it has been embraced by everyone from advocates for arts education to parents hoping to encourage their kids to stick with piano lessons, two new studies conducted by Harvard researchers show no effect of music training on the cognitive abilities of young children.
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Nation & World
A higher plane
Research by scientists in Elizabeth Spelke’s lab suggests our innate understanding of abstract geometry has origins in the evolutionary past.
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Nation & World
Finding our way
Elizabeth Spelke, a professor of psychology, discussed research on how humans develop navigational skills in an event at the Barker Center.
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Nation & World
They are born to add
How does someone who hasn’t learned to count yet, say a preschooler, deal with numbers? Adults are comfortable with symbols like “10” to signify 10 balloons, beeps, or beliefs. But…
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Nation & World
Which comes first, language or thought?
“Infants are born with a language-independent system for thinking about objects,” says Elizabeth Spelke, a professor of psychology at Harvard. “These concepts give meaning to the words they learn later.”…