Hostname: page-component-7479d7b7d-qs9v7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-12T10:23:56.501Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Response to commentaries on What Babies Know

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 June 2024

Elizabeth S. Spelke Open the ORCID record for Elizabeth S. Spelke [Opens in a new window]
Elizabeth S. Spelke*
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, Harvard University, and Center for Brains, Minds & Machines, Cambridge, MA, USA spelke@wjh.harvard.edu
*
*Corresponding author.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Twenty-five commentaries raise questions concerning the origins of knowledge, the interplay of iconic and propositional representations in mental life, the architecture of numerical and social cognition, the sources of uniquely human cognitive capacities, and the borders among core knowledge, perception, and thought. They also propose new methods, drawn from the vibrant, interdisciplinary cognitive sciences, for addressing these questions and deepening understanding of infant minds.

Type
Author's Response
Information
Behavioral and Brain Sciences , Volume 47 , 2024 , e146
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Amalric, M., & Dehaene, S. (2016). Origins of the brain networks for advanced mathematics in expert mathematicians. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 113(18), 4909–4917.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bergelson, E. (2020). Why do older infants understand words better? Child Development Perspectives, 14(3), 142–149.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Block, N. (2022). The border between seeing and thinking. Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Bonner, M. F., & Epstein, R. A. (2017). Coding of navigational affordances in the human visual system. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 114, 4793–4798.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Clifton, R. K., Rochat, P., Litovsky, R. Y., & Perris, E. E. (1991). Object representation guides infants’ reaching in the dark. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 17(2), 323–329.Google ScholarPubMed
Dean, J. T., Dillon, M. R., Duflo, E., Kannan, H., & Spelke, E. S. (2023). Number and geometry games combining symbols with intuitive material durably enhance poor children's learning of first-grade mathematics. Unpublished manuscript, Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) South Asia, New Delhi, India.Google Scholar
DeLoache, J. S. (2004). Becoming symbol-minded. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 8(2), 66–70.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Dillon, M. R., Kannan, H., Dean, J. T., Spelke, E. S., & Duflo, E. (2017). Cognitive science in the field: A preschool intervention durably enhances intuitive but not formal mathematics. Science, 357(6346), 47–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Doeller, C. F., & Burgess, N. (2008). Distinct error-correcting and incidental learning of location relative to landmarks and boundaries. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105(15), 5909–5914.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Farooq, U., & Dragoi, G. (2019). Emergence of preconfigured and plastic time-compressed sequences in early postnatal development. Science, 363(6423), 168–173.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gandhi, K., Stojnik, G., Lake, B. M., & Dillon, M. R. (2021). Baby intuitions benchmark (BIB): Discerning the goals, preferences and actions of others. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 34. Conference Proceedings (pdf, Supplement) (arXiv:2102.11938).Google Scholar
Gennari, G., Dehaene, S., Valera, C., & Dehaene-Lambertz, G. (2023). Spontaneous supra-modal encoding of number in the infant brain. Current Biology, 33(10), 1906–1915.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hamlin, J. K. (2023). Core morality? Or merely core agents and social beings? A response to Spelke's What babies know. Mind & Language, 38(5), 1323–1335.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Izard, V., Sann, C., Spelke, E. S., & Streri, A. (2009). Newborn infants perceive abstract numbers. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106(25), 10382–10385.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Julian, J. B., Ryan, J., Hamilton, R. H., & Epstein, R. A. (2016). The occipital place area is causally involved in representing environmental boundaries during navigation. Current Biology, 26(8), 1104–1109.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kinzler, K., & Spelke, E. S. (2011). Do infants show social preferences for people differing in race? Cognition, 119(1), 1–9.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kosslyn, S. M. (1980). Image and mind. Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Muller, M., & Wehner, W. (1988). Path integration in desert ants. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 85, 5287–5290.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Neff, M. B., & Martin, A. (2023). Do face-to-face interactions support 6-month-olds’ understanding of the communicative function of speech? Infancy, 28, 240–256.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Norman, Y., Yeagle, E. M., Khuvis, S., Harel, M., Mehta, A. D., & Malach, R. (2019). Hippocampal short-wave ripples linked to visual episodic recollection in humans. Science (New York, N.Y.), 365, eaax1030.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pascalis, O., de Haan, N., & Nelson, C. A. (2002). Is face processing species-specific during the first year of life? Science, 295(5571), 1321–1323.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Powell, L. J., & Spelke, E. S. (2013). Preverbal infants expect members of social groups to act alike. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 110(41), 3965–3952.Google ScholarPubMed
Pyers, J. E., & Senghas, A. (2009). Language promotes false belief understanding: Evidence from learners of a new sign language. Psychological Science, 20(7), 805–812.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Pyers, J. E., Shusterman, A., Senghas, A., Spelke, E. S., & Emmory, K. (2010). Evidence from an emerging sign language reveals that language supports spatial cognition. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 107(27), 12116–12120.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Quilty-Dunn, J., Porot, N., & Mandelbaum, E. (2023). The best game in town: The re-emergence of the language-of-thought hypothesis across the cognitive sciences. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 46, e261.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rochat, P. (2018). The ontogeny of human self-consciousness. Current Directions in Psychological Sciences, 27(5), 345–350.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shepard, R. M. (1984). Ecological constraints on mental representation: Resonant kinematics of perceiving, imagining, thinking and dreaming. Psychological Review, 91, 417–447.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Spaepen, E., Coppola, M., Spelke, E. S., Carey, S., & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2011). Number without a language model. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 108(8), 3163–3168.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Spaepen, E., Flaherty, M., Coppola, M., Spelke, E. S., & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2013). Generating a lexicon without a language model: Do words for number count? Journal of Memory and Language, 69(4), 496–505.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Spelke, E. S. (2023). Core knowledge, language learning and the origins of morality and pedagogy: Reply to reviews of What Babies Know. Mind and Language, 38(5), 1336–1350.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tenenbaum, J. T., Kemp, C., Griffiths, T. L., & Goodman, N. D. (2011). How to grow a mind: Statistics, structure and abstraction. Science (New York, N.Y.), 331(6022), 1279–1285.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thomas, A. J., Saxe, R., & Spelke, E. S. (2022). Infants infer potential social partners by observing the interactions of their parents with unknown others. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 119(32), e2121390119.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ullman, T. D. (2015). On the nature and origin of intuitive theories: Learning physics and psychology [Doctoral dissertation]. MIT.Google Scholar
Ullman, T. D., Spelke, E. S., Battaglia, P., & Tenenbaum, J. B. (2017). Mind games: Game engines as an architecture for intuitive physics. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 21(9), 649–665.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ullman, T. D., & Tenenbaum, J. B. (2020). Bayesian models of conceptual development: Learning as building models of the world. Annual Review of Developmental Psychology, 2(1), 533–558.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
von Hofsten, C., & Spelke, E. S. (1985). Object perception and object-directed reaching in infancy. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 114(2), 198–212.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Winkler-Rhoades, N., Carey, S., & Spelke, E. S. (2013). Two-year-old children interpret abstract, purely geometric maps. Developmental Science, 16(3), 365–376.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed