Elizabeth Shilin Spelke FBA (born May 28, 1949) is an American cognitive psychologist at the Department of Psychology of Harvard University and director of the Laboratory for Developmental Studies.

[5] She was the recipient of the 2009 Jean Nicod Prize and delivered a series of lectures in Paris hosted by the French National Centre for Scientific Research.

[8][9] The kind of experiments carried out at the Laboratory of Developmental Studies try to infer the cognitive abilities of babies by using the method of preferential looking, developed by Robert Fantz.

Through an array of similar experiments, Spelke interpreted her evidence to suggest that babies have a set of highly sophisticated, innate mental skills.

This provides an alternative to the hypothesis originated by William James that babies are born with no distinctive cognitive abilities but acquire them all through education and experience (see Principles of Psychology, 1890).

[2] She declared that her own experiments revealed no difference between the mental capacities of male and female children ranging in age from 5 months to 7 years old.