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How Children Learn - Dr. Elizabeth Spelke, Harvard University
Tuesday, March 03, 2026, 02:00pm - 03:20pm
152 Frelinghuysen Rd, Psych Bldg., Busch Campus, Room 105
Abstract: Children are likely the most prodigious learners on earth: With little to no instruction, they master the commonsense concepts and skills that their culture requires, and then they go on, in school, to master highly demanding symbolic skills and systems of knowledge beyond both intuition and perception. How do children do this? Research on human infants, children, adults, and non-human animals, using diverse methods from the developmental, brain, and computational cognitive sciences, provides evidence for six systems of core knowledge that emerge in infancy, are shared with other animals, and serve to represent places, objects, animate beings, social beings, number and geometry. Claims for these systems, however, have recently faced three challenges: They have been argued to be perceptual rather than conceptual; to be highly interactive rather than modular; and to fail as aids to children’s mastery of the symbolic skills taught in school. Here I discuss and respond to these three challenges, as they prompt further insights into the nature and workings of children’s developing minds.
Bio: Dr. Elizabeth Spelke
Elizabeth Spelke is the Marshall L. Berkman Professor of Psychology in the Psychology Department at Harvard University and an investigator at the Center for Brains, Minds and Machines in Cambridge, MA. She studies both the initial cognitive capacities that emerge in human infancy, summarized in her book, What Babies Know (2022), and children’s capacities for fast and flexible learning about objects, places, people, number and geometry. With the economist, Esther Duflo, and the Research Director of Pratham, Rukmini Banerji, she leverages findings from the developmental cognitive sciences to create and evaluate interventions to enhance poor children’s learning, and she uses findings from evaluations of the interventions to deepen understanding of how all children learn. Her awards include the Atkinson Prize in Psychological and Cognitive Sciences from the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (2014) and the deCarvalho-Heineken Prize for Cognitive Science (2016). She studied at Harvard (A. B., Radcliffe College, 1971) and Cornell University (Ph.D., 1978).