Departmental Colloquium - Elisabeth Spelke (Harvard University)

Elizabeth S. Spelke is Professor of Psychology at the Department of Psychology, Harvard University.

Spelke’s laboratory focuses on the sources of uniquely human cognitive capacities, especially young children’s prodigious capacities for fast and flexible learning. She studies these capacities by investigating their origins and growth in human infants and children, by considering human cognition in relation to the capacities of diverse nonhuman animals, by comparing the capacities of humans from diverse cultures, and then by collaborating with neuroscientists, computational cognitive scientists, and economists to probe how and why children learn in the ways they do.