Elizabeth Spelke
Elizabeth Shilin Spelke (born May 28, 1949 in New York City ) is an American developmental psychologist and cognitive scientist.
Life
Elizabeth Spelke studied at Harvard University (Radcliffe College) with a bachelor's degree in 1971 (Social Relations), where the child psychologist Jerome Kagan was her teacher, studied 1972/73 at Yale University and 1978 at Cornell University in psychology with the Developmental Psychologist Eleanor Gibson is doing her PhD. In 1977 she became Assistant Professor and 1986 Professor at the University of Pennsylvania . In 1982/83 she was visiting scholar at MIT and in 1984/85 in Paris at CNRS (Fulbright Fellow). In 1996 she became a professor of cognitive science at MIT and has been a professor at Harvard since 2001.
She is with Susan Carey the founder and director of the Laboratory for Development Studies at Harvard University.
Elizabeth Spelke investigated the development of intellectual cognitive abilities in children, adolescents and adults in experiments and is a proponent of the thesis that many of them are innate. In her experiments with babies, she used Robert Fantz's Preferential Looking Method , which measures the differences in reactions (preferences) of babies over the length of time these images presented to them pay attention to. She found, for example, that babies have certain innate expectations about the behavior of objects, for example that they move continuously and that solid objects do not penetrate one another. She also found a natural disposition for estimating the number of elements in a set (including some kind of addition and subtraction) as well as length estimations (while the use of other properties, such as color, to locate objects is not developed until later).
She also examined the social behavior of young children and found, for example, that babies just a few weeks old already had a preference for people whose language style (e.g. regional accents) they were familiar with, while their external appearance, such as the color of a person's skin, was less so in comparison was important.
Spelke sees human language as a peculiarity of humans to combine basic innate abilities and thus to get beyond the developmental level of apes with increasing age. They therefore develop more advanced skills for spatial orientation, for example on placemarks, at the same time as they can express them verbally.
In 2005, she also took part in a prominent position in a debate about cognitive differences in men and women, although she sees no scientifically proven evidence of significant differences and could not find it in her own experiments with children. It was triggered by a remark by then Harvard President Lawrence Summers , who speculated about innate mathematical abilities of men compared to women. She also led a public debate with her colleague Steven Pinker , who argued on the side of Summer.
Spelke is a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and became a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1997 and a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1999 . In 1988 she was a Guggenheim Fellow. In 2001 she received the Neuronal Plasticity Prize , the Jean Nicod Prize in 2009 and the CL de Carvalho Heineken Prize for Cognitive Science in 2016 .
She has been married since 1988 and has two children.
Web links
- Harvard website
- Natalie Angier, Insights from the youngest minds , The New York Times, April 30, 2012
Individual evidence
- ↑ Birth and career data according to American Men and Women of Science , Thomson Gale 2004
- ^ The Science of Gender and Science, Pinker vs. Spelke. A Debate , The Edge, May 16, 2005
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Spelke, Elizabeth |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Spelke, Elizabeth Shilin (full name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American psychologist and cognitive scientist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | May 28, 1949 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | New York City |