Session 1 – Fundamental Learning (English to French)
Elizabeth Spelke
Elizabeth Spelke is the Marshall L. Berkman Professor of Psychology in the Psychology Department at Harvard University and an investigator at the Center for Brains, Minds and Machines in Cambridge, MA. She studies both the initial cognitive capacities that emerge in human infancy, summarized in her book, What Babies Know (2022), and children’s capacities for fast and flexible learning about objects, places, people, number and geometry. With Duflo and her colleagues, she leverages findings from the developmental cognitive sciences to create and evaluate interventions to enhance poor children’s learning, and she uses findings from evaluations of the interventions to deepen understanding of how all children learn. Her awards include the Atkinson Prize in Psychological and Cognitive Sciences from the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (2014) and the de Carvalho-Heineken Prize for Cognitive Science (2016). She studied at Harvard (A. B., Radcliffe College, 1971) and Cornell University (Ph.D. 1978).
