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From Core Concepts to New Systems of Knowledge

Elizabeth Spelke (Harvard University)

Distinguished Lecture Series

Thursday, November 14, 2019, 3:30 pm

Amazon Auditorium

Abstract

Elizabeth Spelke

Young children rapidly gain a basic, commonsense understanding of how the world works. Research on infants suggests that this understanding rests on a set of early emerging, domain-specific cognitive systems. Six systems of core knowledge serve to represent objects and their motions, animate beings and their actions, social beings and their engagements, places and their relations of distance and direction, forms and their scale-invariant geometry, and number. These systems are innate, abstract, strikingly limited, and yet present and functional throughout human life. Infants' knowledge then grows both through gradual learning processes that people share with other animals, and through a fast and flexible learning process that appears to be unique to our species and emerges with the onset of language. The latter process composes new systems of concepts productively by combining concepts from core knowledge. The compositional process is poorly understood but amenable to study through coordinated research in psychology, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence. To illustrate, this talk will focus on core knowledge of places, objects, and people, and on one new system of concepts that emerges early in human development: the artifact concepts underlying our prolific tool use.

Bio

Elizabeth Spelke is the Marshall L. Berkman Professor of Psychology at Harvard University and an investigator at the NSF-MIT Center for Brains, Minds and Machines. Her laboratory focuses on the sources of uniquely human cognitive capacities, including capacities for formal mathematics, for constructing and using symbols, and for developing comprehensive taxonomies of objects. She probes the sources of these capacities primarily through behavioral research on human infants and preschool children, focusing on the origins and development of their understanding of objects, actions, people, places, number, and geometry. In collaboration with computational cognitive scientists, she aims to test computational models of infants’ cognitive capacities. In collaboration with economists, she has begun to take her research from the laboratory to the field, where randomized controlled experiments can serve to evaluate interventions, guided by research in cognitive science, that seek to enhance young children's learning.