How Elizabeth Spelke Peers into the Infant Mind.
Over the past three decades, Spelke has created a series of ingenious studies that have given us a picture of the baby mind which is far different from the long-standing view of it as, in William James’s famous formulation, a "blooming, buzzing confusion." As Spelke likes to say, there are some forms of knowledge that humans get "for free." Even at two and a half months, she argues, infants apprehend certain laws of the physical world -- for example, that objects are cohesive and distinct and cannot pass through solid surfaces, and that they move along expected trajectories unless something obstructs them. Contrary to the Swiss developmental psychologist Jean Piaget -- who believed that babies were born with sensory capacities but with no real knowledge, and who theorized, in 1954, that infants lacked a sense of "object permanence" -- Spelke says that even newborns understand that things still exist when they can no longer see them. Babies, in her view, have a sense of other people as "goal-directed agents" who are capable of forming intentions and acting on them. And humans are endowed with a natural sense of geometry, an ability to orient themselves in space.
