Elizabeth S. Spelke teaches at Harvard University, where she is the Marshall L. Berkman Professor of Psychology and a member of the Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines. After studying at Harvard (BA 1971) and Cornell Universities (PhD 1978), she taught at the University of Pennsylvania, Cornell, and MIT before moving to Harvard in 2001. She is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences. Her awards include the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association, the William James Award of the American Psychological Society, the Jean Nicod Prize, the IPSEN Prize in Neuronal Plasticity, the de Carvalho-Heineken Prize in Cognitive Science, the George A. Miller Prize of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, the John P. McGovern Award of the American Academy for the Association for the Advancement of Science, the Inaugural Prize in

the Psychological and Cognitive Sciences of the National Academy of Sciences (now the Atkinson Prize), and honorary degrees from the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (Paris) and the Universities of Umea, Utrecht, and Paris-Descartes. She studies the origins and nature of knowledge of objects, places, and people, as well as knowledge of abstract entities such as numbers, geometric forms, mental states, and causality.

• Prologue


• 1. Vision


• 2. Objects


• 3. Places


• 4. Number


• 5. Core knowledge


• 6. Forms


• 7. Agents


• 8. Core social cognition


• 9. Language


• 10. Beyond Core Knowledge