About

Her laboratory focuses on the sources of uniquely human cognitive capacities, including capacities for formal mathematics, for constructing and using symbols, and for developing comprehensive taxonomies of objects. She probes the sources of these capacities primarily through behavioral research on human infants and preschool children, focusing on the origins and development of their understanding of objects, actions, people, places, number, and geometry. In collaboration with computational cognitive scientists, she aims to test computational models of infants’ cognitive capacities. In collaboration with economists, she has begun to take her research from the laboratory to the field, where randomized controlled experiments can serve to evaluate interventions, guided by research in cognitive science, that seek to enhance young children’s learning.

Research topics

• Psychology
• Developmental psychology
• Sociology
• Cognitive science
• Computer Science
• World Wide Web
• Data science
• Neuroscience
• Cognitive psychology
• Demography
• Psychoanalysis
• Social psychology

Selected publications

• Using machine learning to understand age and gender classification based on infant temperament

  UNC Libraries · 2025-04-18

  articleOpen access

  Age and gender differences are prominent in the temperament literature, with the former particularly salient in infancy and the latter noted as early as the first year of life. This study represents a meta-analysis utilizing Infant Behavior Questionnaire-Revised (IBQ-R) data collected across multiple laboratories (N = 4438) to overcome limitations of smaller samples in elucidating links among temperament, age, and gender in early childhood. Algorithmic modeling techniques were leveraged to discern the extent to which the 14 IBQ-R subscale scores accurately classified participating children as boys (n = 2,298) and girls (n = 2,093), and into three age groups: youngest (< 24 weeks; n = 1,102), mid-range (24 to 48 weeks; n = 2,557), and oldest (> 48 weeks; n = 779). Additionally, simultaneous classification into age and gender categories was performed, providing an opportunity to consider the extent to which gender differences in temperament are informed by infant age. Results indicated that overall age group classification was more accurate than child gender models, suggesting that age-related changes are more salient than gender differences in early childhood with respect to temperament attributes. However, gender-based classification was superior in the oldest age group, suggesting temperament differences between boys and girls are accentuated with development. Fear emerged as the subscale contributing to accurate classifications most notably overall. This study leads infancy research and meta-analytic investigations more broadly in a new direction as a methodological demonstration, and also provides most optimal comparative data for the IBQ-R based on the largest and most representative dataset to date.

  PublisherDOI

• Infants' recognition of social conventions

  2025-05-13

  preprintOpen access

  From early in life, humans expect members of the same social group to act like one another. What drives this expectation? Across two experiments, we investigated how 8- and 9-month-old infants’ (N = 100) expectations about shared behaviors align with accounts based on collective identities, ritualistic actions, or conventions. In Experiment 1, infants inferred that an action would generalize to a new group member only when they had previously seen more than one group member share that action, suggesting that multimember demonstration influences infants’ inductive reasoning. In Experiment 2, infants did generalize an action after observing it from just one group member, but only if they had observed that same action shared by two members of another group in a different social context. Together, these findings suggest that infants learn to recognize which actions are socially conventional and then readily generalize these actions even in new social contexts.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Children’s arithmetic skills do not transfer between applied and academic mathematics

  Nature · 2025-02-05 · 9 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  Many children from low-income backgrounds worldwide fail to master school mathematics1; however, some children extensively use mental arithmetic outside school2,3. Here we surveyed children in Kolkata and Delhi, India, who work in markets (n = 1,436), to investigate whether maths skills acquired in real-world settings transfer to the classroom and vice versa. Nearly all these children used complex arithmetic calculations effectively at work. They were also proficient in solving hypothetical market maths problems and verbal maths problems that were anchored to concrete contexts. However, they were unable to solve arithmetic problems of equal or lesser complexity when presented in the abstract format typically used in school. The children’s performance in market maths problems was not explained by memorization, access to help, reduced stress with more familiar formats or high incentives for correct performance. By contrast, children with no market-selling experience (n = 471), enrolled in nearby schools, showed the opposite pattern. These children performed more accurately on simple abstract problems, but only 1% could correctly answer an applied market maths problem that more than one third of working children solved (β = 0.35, s.e.m. = 0.03; 95% confidence interval = 0.30–0.40, P < 0.001). School children used highly inefficient written calculations, could not combine different operations and arrived at answers too slowly to be useful in real-life or in higher maths. These findings highlight the importance of educational curricula that bridge the gap between intuitive and formal maths. Children who learn maths working in markets and children who learn maths only from school were both unable to transfer their skills to new contexts, highlighting a need to reconsider how maths is taught in school.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Infants use imitation but not comforting or social synchrony to evaluate those in social interactions

  2025-05-24

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  To understand social relationships, humans must recognize cues of affiliation. When infants see interactions between abstract, animated characters, they use imitation, helping, comforting, and exerted effort to predict who will approach whom. Moreover, infants attend to and reach for characters who imitate other characters and those who help others. The present research builds on these findings and asks whether infants reach for human-animated puppets with distinct and variable human voices who imitate, are imitated by, comfort, are comforted by, or move synchronously with a person. At 12 months, infants reached more often for puppets who imitate a human's sound, and for those who were not targets of imitation. In contrast, infants did not reach more for puppets who comforted or synchronized their motions with a human actor. By 12 months, therefore, infants show differentiated responses to different acts of social engagement by those whose social interactions they observe as third parties.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Intuitions for Multiplication in Amazonian Adults and in US Adults and Children

  HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe) · 2025-11-05

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  In all populations, performance shows a characteristic ratio effect

  PublisherDOI

• Perceptual Foundations of Euclidean Geometry

  HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe) · 2025-11-05 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Accueil Parcourir Services Documentation HAL Poster De Conférence Année : 2019 Perceptual Foundations of Euclidean Geometry Véronique Izard (1, 2) , Pierre Pica (3, 4) , Elizabeth Spelke (1, 5) 1 Departement of Psychology 2 CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique 3 SFL - Structures Formelles du Langage 4 ICE - Instituto do Cérebro, UFRN, Natal 5 Harvard University Résumé Euclidean geometry defines objects that can be realized in space, and may therefore be founded in spatial perception. We investigated whether the perception of small, 2-dimen- sional visual forms could provide cognitive foundations for Euclidean knowledge, by asking two questions. First, are humans sensitive to form variations that are relevant to Eu- clidean geometry (e.g. changes in angle)? Second, can ob- servers easily disregard variations that are irrelevant to Eu- clidean geometry (e.g., changes in scale)? Participants from the U.S. (age 3-34 years) and from the Amazon (age 5-67) were asked to locate deviants in panels of 6 forms of vari- able orientation. Results indicate that perception of forms aligns with a restricted version of Euclidean geometry, where forms are defined in terms of metric proportions and global size, but mirror images are assimilated. Moreo- ver, children below 6 did not clearly analyze forms in terms of the shape property of angle.

  PublisherDOI

• Infants use imitation but not comforting or social synchrony to evaluate those in social interactions

  2025-05-22

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  In order to understand social relationships, humans must recognize cues of affiliation. When infants see interactions between abstract, animated characters, they use imitation, helping, comforting, and exerted effort to predict who will approach whom. Moreover, infants attend to and reach for characters who imitate other characters and those who help others. The present research builds on these findings and asks whether infants reach for human-animated puppets with distinct and variable human voices who imitate, are imitated by, comfort, are comforted by, or move synchronously with a person. At 12 months, infants reached more often for puppets who imitate a human's sound, and also for those who were not targets of imitation. In contrast, infants did not reach more for puppets who comforted or synchronized their motions with a human actor. By 12 months, therefore, infants show differentiated responses to different acts of social engagement by those whose social interactions they observe as third parties.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Rapid emergence of a maths gender gap in first grade

  Nature · 2025-06-11 · 19 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Infants use imitation but not comforting or social synchrony to evaluate those in social interactions

  2025-05-22 · 6 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  In order to understand social relationships, humans must recognize cues of affiliation. When infants see interactions between abstract, animated characters, they use imitation, helping, comforting, and exerted effort to predict who will approach whom. Moreover, infants attend to and reach for characters who imitate other characters and those who help others. The present research builds on these findings and asks whether infants reach for human-animated puppets with distinct and variable human voices who imitate, are imitated by, comfort, are comforted by, or move synchronously with a person. At 12 months, infants reached more often for puppets who imitate a human's sound, and also for those who were not targets of imitation. In contrast, infants did not reach more for puppets who comforted or synchronized their motions with a human actor. By 12 months, therefore, infants show differentiated responses to different acts of social engagement by those whose social interactions they observe as third parties.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Digitally Supervised Play of Math Games Improves Math Learning More When the Games Are Played With Peers Than When Played Individually

  Cognitive Science · 2025-12-01

  article

  Because many children worldwide fail to realize their potential for learning school mathematics, diverse initiatives have embraced using digital technologies that provide feedback to individual children. Such training, however, draws children's attention away from the teacher and peers, reducing opportunities for peer-to-peer teaching, learning, and collaboration. In this paper, we present a novel approach to learning through a digitally controlled training program providing partial feedback to groups of children who play together with concrete materials to foster discussion, collaboration, and consensus-based responses to mathematical problems. To evaluate the effectiveness of this approach, children from each participating classroom were randomly assigned to play the same math games either individually on digital tablets with feedback to each individual child or in small groups using physical cards guided by a digital device that provided feedback only at group level: a "Magic Box." To encourage children in both conditions to reflect on their performance and correct their errors, partial rather than complete feedback was given in both conditions. Results showed that play in groups produced greater improvement in children's math skills than individual play. Thus, math play in groups with partial digital feedback may serve as an effective complement to traditional school math curricula.

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• Sources of Mathematical Thinking

  NSF · $1.7M · 2004–2008

• Core Systems for Learning Mathematics

  NSF · $1.4M · 2014–2022

• NIH Grant R01HD02310326

  NIH · $456k · 2013

• Sources of Mathematical Thinking

  NSF · $997k · 2007–2014

• NIH Grant R37HD023103

  NIH · $2.2M · 2003

Frequent coauthors

• Stanislas Dehaene

  NeuroSpine Institute

  171 shared

• Véronique Izard

  Université Paris Cité

  143 shared

• Pierre Pica

  Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte

  136 shared

• Shari Liu

  Johns Hopkins University

  57 shared

• Moira R. Dillon

  New York University

  42 shared

• Tomer Ullman

  Harvard University

  34 shared

• Véronique Izard

  Université Paris Cité

  30 shared

• Brandon M. Woo

  Harvard University

  23 shared

Labs

• Spelke LabPI

Education

• Ph.D., Psychology

  Harvard University

  1984

• B.A., Psychology

  University of California, Berkeley

  1979

Awards & honors

• Phi Beta Kappa, 1971
• Sigma Xi, Cornell University 1978
• Fulbright-Hays Senior Research Fellowship, 1983
• McCandless Young Scientist Research Award, APA, 1984
• John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, 1989