What Babies Know: Core Knowledge and Composition Volume 1

by Elizabeth Spelke

What do infants know? How does the knowledge that they begin with prepare them for learning about the particular physical, cultural, and social world in which they live? Answers to this question shed light not only on infants but on children and adults in all cultures, because the core knowledge possessed by infants never goes away. Instead, it underlies the unspoken, common sense knowledge of people of all ages, in all societies. By studying babies, researchers gain insights into infants themselves, into older children's prodigious capacities for learning, and into some of the unconscious assumptions that guide our thoughts and actions as adults.

In this major new work, Elizabeth Spelke shares these insights by distilling the findings from research in developmental, comparative, and cognitive psychology, with excursions into studies of animal cognition in psychology and in systems and cognitive neuroscience, and studies in the computational cognitive sciences. Weaving across these disciplines, she paints a picture of what young infants know, and what they quickly come to learn, about objects, places, numbers, geometry, and people's actions, social engagements, and mental states.

A landmark publication in the developmental literature, the book will be essential for students and researchers across the behavioral, brain, and cognitive sciences.

Genres: Psychology, Science

560 pages, Hardcover

First published August 17, 2022

Reviews

[KL · Rating 5 out of 5]

Notes for myself:
- A useful framework for the core cognitive capacities babies have at birth and develop as a child, e.g., object, place, form, number, agents, and social cognition.
- The book is mostly about psychology experiments and results.

[Andrew Bahle · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I grow up I want to be Liz Spelke/I think this book may have unironically changed my life. So thankful to have this work collected in a way that was engaging and accessible to a non developmental psychologist.

[Benji · Rating 4 out of 5]

Language learning is not a bug but a feature of language and a source of its cognitive power.

By learning a natural language, children may overcome the constraints on attention that limit the productive combination of representations from distinct systems of core knowledge.

Language learning reverses the curse of a compositional mind.

[Farah Sümeyye Tunç · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yüksek lisansa hazırlanırken okuduğum şahane bir alan kitabı. Hayatımın sonuna kadar bebeklerle ve çocuklarla çalışmak onların o güzel dünyalarında olmak istiyorum.