Elizabeth S Spelke

Biographic Data

ID1464150
NAMEElizabeth S Spelke
GIVEN NAMESElizabeth S
FAMILY NAMESpelke
SIGNATURESPELKE E S
AFFILIATIONSHarvard University
ORCID0000-0002-6925-3618
VERIFIEDYes
TOTAL WORKS49
TOTAL CITATIONS96
AUTHOR COUNT49
EDITOR COUNT0
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR1973
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2025
H-INDEX7

  • Examining the Lexical Development of Multilingual Children in Ghana Using an Adapted Vocabulary Checklist

    Open AccessJoseph R Coffey, Elizabeth S Spelke et al.ARTICLEFirst Language2025

    We examine vocabulary growth in children aged 14 to 25 months in Ghana ( n = 937) using a novel 88-word parent report vocabulary checklist developed with assistance from local consultants. The measure was designed to assess the downstream impacts of an earlier high school education intervention children’s parents had enrolled in as adolescents. Most children were spoken to in a dialect of Akan; half had exposure to at least one other language, mo…

  • Digitally Supervised Play of Math Games Improves Math Learning More When the Games Are Played With Peers Than When Played Individually

    Open AccessNadir Díaz‐simón, Guillermo Trinidad et al.ARTICLECognitive Science2025References: 46

    Because many children worldwide fail to realize their potential for learning school mathematics, diverse initiatives have embraced using digital technologies that provide feedback to individual children. Such training, however, draws children's attention away from the teacher and peers, reducing opportunities for peer‐to‐peer teaching, learning, and collaboration. In this paper, we present a novel approach to learning through a digitally controll…

  • Infants Infer Social Relationships Between Individuals Who Engage in Imitative Social Interactions

    Open AccessVanessa Kudrnova, Elizabeth S Spelke et al.ARTICLEOpen MIND2024

    Infants are born into rich social networks and are faced with the challenge of learning about them. When infants observe social interactions, they make predictions about future behavior, but it is not clear whether these predictions are based on social dispositions, social relationships, or both. The current studies (N = 188, N = 90 males) address this question in 12-month-old infants and 16- to 18-month-old toddlers who observe social interactio…

  • Toddlers Prefer Agents Who Help Those Facing Harder Tasks

    Open AccessBrandon Matthew Woo, Shari Liu et al.ARTICLEOpen MIND2024

    Capacities to understand and evaluate others’ actions are fundamental to human social life. Infants and toddlers are sensitive to the costs of others’ actions, infer others’ values from the costs of the actions they take, and prefer those who help others to those who hinder them, but it is largely unknown whether and how cost considerations inform early understanding of third-party prosocial actions. In three experiments (N = 94), we asked whethe…

  • Do toddlers reason about other people's experiences of objects? A limit to early mental state reasoning

    Open AccessBrandon Matthew Woo, Gabriel H Chisholm et al.ARTICLECognition2024

  • Core knowledge, language learning, and the origins of morality and pedagogy: Reply to reviews of What babies know

    Open AccessElizabeth S SpelkeARTICLEMind & Language2023

    The astute reviews by Hamlin and by Revencu and Csibra provide compelling arguments and evidence for the early emergence of moral evaluation, communication, and pedagogical learning. I accept these conclusions but not the reviewers' claims that infants' talents in these domains depend on core systems of moral evaluation or pedagogical communication. Instead, I suggest that core knowledge of people as agents and as social beings, together with inf…

  • Infants and toddlers leverage their understanding of action goals to evaluate agents who help others

    Open AccessBrandon Matthew Woo, Elizabeth S SpelkeARTICLEChild Development2023

    Why do infants and toddlers prefer helpers? Four experiments (conducted from 2019–2022; n = 136, 66% White, 15% Asian, 4% Black, 2% Hispanic/Latino, 13% multiracial, majority USA) investigated whether infants and toddlers favor agents whose actions allow others to achieve their goals. In the key experiment, 8-month-old infants and 15-month-old toddlers viewed a protagonist who tried and failed to open a box that contained a toy while two other ag…

  • Dangerous Ground: One-Year-Old Infants are Sensitive to Peril in Other Agents’ Action Plans

    Open AccessShari Liu, Bill Pepe et al.ARTICLEOpen MIND2022

    Do infants appreciate that other people’s actions may fail, and that these failures endow risky actions with varying degrees of negative utility (i.e., danger)? Three experiments, including a pre-registered replication, addressed this question by presenting 12- to 15-month-old infants (N = 104, 52 female, majority White) with an animated agent who jumped over trenches of varying depth towards its goals. Infants expected the agent to minimize the …

  • Visual foundations of Euclidean geometry

    Open AccessVéronique Izard, Pierre Pica et al.ARTICLECognitive Psychology2022

    Geometry defines entities that can be physically realized in space, and our knowledge of abstract geometry may therefore stem from our representations of the physical world. Here, we focus on Euclidean geometry, the geometry historically regarded as "natural". We examine whether humans possess representations describing visual forms in the same way as Euclidean geometry - i.e., in terms of their shape and size. One hundred and twelve participants…

  • Infants’ sensitivity to shape changes in 2D visual forms

    Open AccessMoira R Dillon, Véronique Izard et al.ARTICLEInfancy2020

    Research in developmental cognitive science reveals that human infants perceive shape changes in 2D visual forms that are repeatedly presented over long durations. Nevertheless, infants’ sensitivity to shape under the brief conditions of natural viewing has been little studied. Three experiments tested for this sensitivity by presenting 128 seven‐month‐old infants with shapes for the briefer durations under which they might see them in dynamic sc…

  • Children use targets’ facial appearance to guide and predict social behavior

    Tessa E S Charlesworth, Sa‐kiera Tiarra Jolynn Hudson et al.ARTICLEDevelopmental Psychology2019Cited by: 4References: 5

    Humans possess a tendency to rapidly and consistently make character evaluations from mere facial appearance. Recent work shows that this tendency emerges surprisingly early: children as young as 3-years-old provide adult-like assessments of others on character attributes such as "nice," "strong," and "smart" based only on subtle variations in targets' face shape and physiognomy (i.e., latent face-traits). The present research examined the behavi…

  • From map reading to geometric intuitions

    Open AccessMoira R Dillon, Elizabeth S SpelkeARTICLEDevelopmental Psychology2018Cited by: 1References: 1

    The origins and development of our geometric intuitions have been debated for millennia. The present study links children's developing intuitions about the properties of planar triangles to their developing abilities to read purely geometric maps. Six-year-old children are limited when navigating by maps that depict only the sides of a triangle in an environment composed of only the triangle's corners and vice versa. Six-year-old children also in…

  • Ten-month-old infants infer the value of goals from the costs of actions

    Open AccessShari Liu, Tomer D Ullman et al.ARTICLEScience2017

    Ranking valuations on the basis of observed choices Obliged to make a choice between two goals, we evaluate the benefits of achieving the goals compared with the costs of the actions required before deciding what to do. This seems perfectly straightforward, and it is unsurprising to learn that we can also apply this reasoning to others; that is, someone that we see choosing a goal that requires a more costly action must value that goal more highl…

  • Children's Use of Social Categories in Thinking About People and Social Relationships

    Kristin Shutts, Caroline K P Roben et al.ARTICLEJournal of Cognition and…2013

    A series of studies investigated White U.S. three- and four-year-old children's use of gender and race information to reason about their own and others' relationships and attributes. Three-year-old children used gender- but not race-based similarity between themselves and others to decide with whom they wanted to be friends, as well as to determine which children shared their own preferences for various social activities. Four-year-old (but not y…

  • The development of reasoning about beliefs: Fact, preference, and ideology

    Open AccessLarisa Heiphetz, Elizabeth S Spelke et al.ARTICLEJournal of Experimental Social…2012Cited by: 7References: 28

  • The double-edged sword of pedagogy: Instruction limits spontaneous exploration and discovery

    Open AccessElizabeth Bonawitz, Patrick Shafto et al.ARTICLECognition2011

  • Newborn infants perceive abstract numbers

    Open AccessVéronique Izard, Coralie Sann et al.ARTICLEProceedings of the National…2009

    Although infants and animals respond to the approximate number of elements in visual, auditory, and tactile arrays, only human children and adults have been shown to possess abstract numerical representations that apply to entities of all kinds (e.g., 7 samurai, seas, or sins). Do abstract numerical concepts depend on language or culture, or do they form a part of humans' innate, core knowledge? Here we show that newborn infants spontaneously ass…

  • Why We Cooperate

    M Tomasello, Brian Skyrms et al.BOOKWhy We Cooperate2009

    Understanding cooperation as a distinctly human combination of innate and learned behavior.Drop something in front of a two-year-old, and she's likely to pick it up for you. This is not a learned behavior, psychologist Michael Tomasello argues. Through observations of young children in experiments he himself has designed, Tomasello shows that children are naturally—and uniquely—cooperative. Put through similar experiments, for example, apes demon…

  • Accent Trumps Race in Guiding Children's Social Preferences

    Katherine D Kinzler, Kristin Shutts et al.ARTICLESocial Cognition2009

    A series of experiments investigated the effect of speakers' language, accent, and race on children's social preferences. When presented with photographs and voice recordings of novel children, 5-year-old children chose to be friends with native speakers of their native language rather than foreign-language or foreign-accented speakers. These preferences were not exclusively due to the intelligibility of the speech, as children found the accented…

  • Log or Linear? Distinct Intuitions of the Number Scale in Western and Amazonian Indigene Cultures

    Open AccessStanislas Dehaene, Véronique Izard et al.ARTICLEScience2008

    The mapping of numbers onto space is fundamental to measurement and to mathematics. Is this mapping a cultural invention or a universal intuition shared by all humans regardless of culture and education? We probed number-space mappings in the Mundurucu, an Amazonian indigene group with a reduced numerical lexicon and little or no formal education. At all ages, the Mundurucu mapped symbolic and nonsymbolic numbers onto a logarithmic scale, whereas…

  • Foundations of cooperation in young children

    Open AccessKristina R Olson, Elizabeth S SpelkeARTICLECognition2008

  • Accent Over Race: The Role of Language in Guiding Children's Early Social Preferences

    Katherine D Kinzler, Kristin Shutts et al.ARTICLEThe Evolution of Language2008

  • Judgments of the lucky across development and culture

    Kristina R Olson, Yarrow Dunham et al.ARTICLEJournal of Personality and Social…2008Cited by: 2References: 20

    For millennia, human beings have believed that it is morally wrong to judge others by the fortuitous or unfortunate events that befall them or by the actions of another person. Rather, an individual's own intended, deliberate actions should be the basis of his or her evaluation, reward, and punishment. In a series of studies, the authors investigated whether such rules guide the judgments of children. The first 3 studies demonstrated that childre…

  • Nonsymbolic, approximate arithmetic in children: Abstract addition prior to instruction

    Hilary Barth, Lacey Beckmann et al.ARTICLEDevelopmental Psychology2008Cited by: 7

    Do children draw upon abstract representations of number when they perform approximate arithmetic operations? In this study, kindergarten children viewed animations suggesting addition of a sequence of sounds to an array of dots, and they compared the sum to a second dot array that differed from the sum by 1 of 3 ratios. Children performed this task successfully with all the signatures of adults' nonsymbolic number representations: accuracy modul…

  • The native language of social cognition

    Open AccessKatherine D Kinzler, Emmanuel Dupoux et al.ARTICLEProceedings of the National…2007

    What leads humans to divide the social world into groups, preferring their own group and disfavoring others? Experiments with infants and young children suggest these tendencies are based on predispositions that emerge early in life and depend, in part, on natural language. Young infants prefer to look at a person who previously spoke their native language. Older infants preferentially accept toys from native-language speakers, and preschool chil…