Elizabeth Spelke Quotes

You see the same profile of difficulty among the educated Bostonian adults, and the going-to-school Bostonian kids, and the adults and children in the Amazon. The problems that were hard for them were hard for us. - Elizabeth Spelke

While geometrical concepts can be enriched by culture-specific devices like maps, or the terms of a natural language, underneath this variability lies a shared set of geometrical concepts. Those concepts allow adults and children with no formal education, and minimal spatial language, to categorize geometrical forms and to use geometrical relationship to represent the surrounding spatial layout. - Elizabeth Spelke

When children start learning math in school, they already have a basic understanding of the concepts. This understanding should guide teachers to work on enhancing these skills. - Elizabeth Spelke

What's central about numbers for us as adults is that we can apply a number like 7 to a diverse number of things. We can say that there are seven dots but also that a horn honks seven times. Although these are different in their sensory qualities, the numbers are the same. - Elizabeth Spelke

What our study shows is that children have a fundamental understanding of addition and of numbers and we hope to harness that ability to enhance mathematic instruction. - Elizabeth Spelke

The experiments of the infants and the monkeys, I think, make it extremely likely that these abilities are inborn. - Elizabeth Spelke

Rhesus monkeys as well as human adults and older children living in a remote Amazon village have been given comparison and addition tasks using arrays of dots, and they show the same abilities we find in 5-year-old Boston children. - Elizabeth Spelke

Knowing this, we may be able to enhance math training. - Elizabeth Spelke

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