Elizabeth Spelke

I read an interesting article in the New Yorker, by Margaret Talbot, titled The Baby Lab: How Elizabeth Spelke peers into the infant mind.

Spelke is a fifty seven year old cognitive psychologist whose focus is on the idea that babies come into the world mentally equipped with certain basic systems for ordering it. She wonders what distinguishes us from other animals? How do we make sense of what goes on around us? What are the core notions that all of our systematic knowledge is based on?

Her research has challenged the view held by William James of a baby’s mind as a “blooming, buzzing confusion”. She believes that there are some forms of knowledge that humans get for free. At two and a half months infants understand certain laws of the physical world. They know that objects are cohesive and distinct and cannot pass through solid surfaces, and they move along expected trajectories unless something obstructs them. This challenged the view of Jean Piaget who said that infants lack a sense of object permanence.

Spelke’s research shows that babies have an ability to compare large approximate sets. They can also do addition and subtraction, tracking small numbers of objects and reasoning about what happens when one is added or taken away.

These innate capacities are the foundations of all other kinds of learning. For instance concept formations that allow you to divide the world in such a way so that they can look at it. Animals are endowed with similar skills. But it is uniquely human to be able to combine such core abilities through language into more sophisticated capacities.

Spelke’s findings on how infants perceive objects as solid, continuos and perduring even when they cant see them and have been incorporated into infant studies curriculum. But her ideas of core knowledge have been challenged by Empiricists, who argue that she underestimates the role of the environment in infant development.

Although her work is being used by parents and educators to start the educational process earlier, she finds that unnecessary and possibly harmful.

“Infants are world class learners, and can be trusted to select, more or less on their own, experiences that will enhance their learning. From the earliest age, they attend to novel objects and events. They are also highly predisposed to learn by observing and interacting with other people”

She thinks teaching children counting at two instead of four is unnecessary, since two year olds are already engaged in the task of mastering much of the encyclopedic knowledge, about objects, events, places and people that adults take for granted. Diverting them from this task by introducing other tasks, like learning to read or work with numbers, seems useless at best and possibly harmful.

She also believes that boys and girls are born with essentially the same cognitive tools.

Her renown in psychology is based on her use of looking time measures, to answer questions not only about perception but also about cognition. Did infants have expectations of how the world worked- and could you determine what these expectations were by determining what surprised them? She emphasizes that she is talking about a babies implicit knowledge- no infant even if he could talk, would say why he cant work through a wall.

She does not believe in brain boosters but does believe in exposing infants to as many experiences as possible with people, places and events that their parents enjoy, so that the infants will have some implicit emotional memory attached to them, and can enjoy them when they are older with their parents.

She is interested in looking at universal human attributes that lie beneath the superficial cognitive differences of language, culture and gender. She looks for deep commonalities.

Her lab has been accused of reifying the concept of race. Just because babies see it doesn’t mean its right. But we shouldn’t be wary of asking the question. In her view nurture or human will is ultimately more powerful than nature, because humans are capable of rejecting certain aspects of their evolutionary inheritance- recognizing them as wrong, either factually or morally or both.

Alison Gopnik, a baby researcher at Berkeley has described Spelke’s idea of core knowledge as fundamentally oversimplified theoretical account. Babies preferences seem to show surprising mutability. A study in 2006 involved Caucasian infants raised in Israel, African infants raised in Ethiopia, and Ethiopia infants raised in Israel. Presented with photos on a screen, the white Israeli infants preferred looking at new faces of their own race. African babies raised in Ethiopia preferred to look at African faces. But the Ethiopian-Israeli infants who had been exposed since birth to people of both races, showed no preference. The conclusion being that babies aren’t prejudiced at all- that they learn to be wary of others only if they grow up in an isolated environment. Or it could mean that babies are programmed to trust people who look more like their own parents, and this instinct can been counter balanced by enlightened education.