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Conferences & lectures

Public lecture: Core Social Cognition

FALL 2014 Public Lecture


Date & time
Thursday, October 16, 2014
8 p.m. – 10 p.m.
Cost

This event is free

Organization

Science College

Contact

514-848-2424 ext. 2595

Where

Oscar Peterson Concert Hall
7141 Sherbrooke W.

Wheel chair accessible

Yes

Dr. ELIZABETH SPELKE

Mature human cognition is complex and variable, both across contemporary cultures and over human history, but human cognitive development proceeds in a more predictable pattern, especially in infants and young children. Studies of infants' cognitive abilities in non-social domains (including object cognition, numerical cognition and spatial cognition) shed light on the starting points for human cognitive development. Together with studies of these cognitive abilities in other animals, at other ages, and with other methods from the cognitive and brain sciences, this research suggests deep properties of physical and mathematical reasoning in older children and adults. Here I ask whether studies of infants can bring similar insights into human social cognition. Do the complex social inferences and intuitions of adults develop from, and build on, simpler systems that are functional in infants? If so, what are the properties of these systems, and what roles do they play in the richer social reasoning that emerges later in development? Recent studies of human infants, using simple behavioral methods, suggest that the answers to these questions may lie within reach. I describe some new findings and call for a multi-species, multi-leveled search for the core mechanisms by which humans navigate the social world.

About the speaker

Elizabeth Spelke received her A.B. from Radcliffe College and her Ph.D. from Cornell University, where she studied cognitive psychology with Ulric Neisser and perception and developmental psychology with Eleanor J. Gibson. She taught in the Psychology Departments of the University of Pennsylvania and Cornell University, and in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, before joining the Department of Psychology at Harvard, where she now directs the Laboratory for Developmental Studies. Dr. Spelke has received numerous prestigious awards: the William James Award, American Psychological Society, 2000; the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award, the American Psychological Association, 2000; America's Best in Science and Medicine, Time Magazine, 2001; National Academy of Sciences Prize in Psychological and Cognitive Sciences, 2014. Over her career, Spelke has probed the origins, development and nature of knowledge of objects, actions, number, geometry, persons and social relationships through behavioral studies of human adults, children, and especially infants. She seeks to shed light on cognitive capacities that are universal across human cultures, early emerging in human development, and fundamental to the unique cognitive achievements of human adults. To foster investigations of cognition at multiple levels, her research seeks to elucidate aspects of human cognition that depend on ancient mechanisms and that therefore can be studied in model animals. To shed light on our species’ unique cognitive achievements, including mastery of systems of formal mathematics, her research also probes the processes that give rise to new concepts over the course of children’s cognitive development.

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