Elizabeth Spelke

Elizabeth Spelke (born May 28 1949) is a cognitive psychologist at the Department of Psychology of Harvard University and director of the Laboratory for Developmental Studies. Starting in the 1980s, she carried out experiments on infants and young children to test their cognitive faculties. She discovered that human beings have a large array of innate mental abilities. In recent years, she had an important role in the debate on cognitive differences between men and women. She defends the position that there is no scientific evidence of any significant disparity in the intellectual faculties of males and females.

Career

Spelke did her undergraduate studies at Harvard with the child psychologist Jerome Kagan. Her thesis studied attachment and emotional reactions in babies. She realized that she needed to have an idea of what babies really understood, and so began her life-long interest in the cognitive aspect of child psychology.

She did her Ph.D. at Cornell with developmental psychologist Eleanor Gibson, from whom she learned how to design experiments on young children.

Her first academic post was at the University of Pennsylvania, where she worked for nine years. Thereafter she moved first to Cornell, and then to MIT's Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. Finally, she was offered a position at Harvard in 2001.

Experiments

The kind of experiments carried out at the Laboratory of Developmental Studies try to infer the cognitive abilities of babies by using the method of "preferential looking", developed by Robert Fantz. This consists of presenting babies with different images and deducing which one is more appealing to them by the length of time their attention fixes on them.

For example, researchers may repeatedly show a baby an image with a certain number of objects. Once the baby is habituated, they present a second image with more or fewer objects. If the baby looks at the new image for a longer time, the researchers may infer that the baby can distinguish different quantities.

Through an array of similar experiments, Spelke interpreted her evidence to suggest that babies have a set of highly sophisticated, innate mental skills. This provides an alternative to the hypothesis originated by William James that babies are born with no distinctive cognitive abilities but acquire them through education and experience (see Principles of Psychology, 1890).

The debate on sex and intelligence

In 2005, Lawrence Summers, then Harvard president, speculated over the preponderance of men over women in high-end science and engineering positions. He surmised that it could be related to innate ability, or innate preference. This declaration immediately sparked a heated debate. Spelke was among the strongest critics of Lawrence Summers and in April 2005 faced Steven Pinker in an open debate over the issue. She declared that her own experiments revealed no difference between the mental capacities of males and females, though it should be noted that this does not address Lawrence Summers' speculation on preferences.

References

*David Dobbs, "Big Answers from Little People", "Scientific American Mind", October 2005.
*Margaret Talbot, "The baby lab", "The New Yorker, Sep. 4, 2006
*Elizabeth Spelke, [http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~lds/sexsci/ "Sex Differences in Intrinsic Aptitude for Mathematics and Science: A Critical Review"]
* [http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/debate05/debate05_index.html Pinker vs. Spelke, The Science of Gender and Science]