Lab Members

Elizabeth Spelke

Professor

Please click here to find Elizabeth Spelke's page

Harvard University
Department of Psychology
33 Kirkland St.
Cambridge, MA 02138

[email protected]
Phone: 617-495-3876

Georgios Dougalis

Lab Manager

[email protected]

617-496-9186

Elena Luchkina

Research Scientist

I am a cognitive scientist investigating the origins of human symbolic communication, language-mediated, and abstract cognition. For example, I look into how and when we first establish the link between words and mental representations of something we have never experienced (e.g., a person we have never met, a hypothetical scenario) or a concept that has no stable perceptual form (e.g., probability, if-then relations, etc.).

I use a combination of behavioral and eye-tracking measures and employ live acting, video-recordings, video-chat, and online apps in my experimental manipulations. I also employ observational methods and corpus analysis in my research.

Aside from conducting my empirical work, I am a founder and a co-lead of the Social Contingency Consortium – a multinational collaboration of 120+ scholars investigating the role of contingent interactions in learning.

Link to my website: www.elenaluchkina.com

Peggy Lee

Research Scientist

My central research interest concerns elucidating the relationship between language and cognitive development - How does the emergence of various linguistic expressions in a child's language depend on the child's growing conceptual capacity? Conversely, in what ways does language acquisition itself make certain concepts more saliently available for problem solving? Furthermore, how might language play a role in the creation of new representational structures?

Marie Amalric

Postdoctoral Fellow

My research focuses on how the human brain learns, represents, and manipulates abstract mathematical concepts. In my work, I try to bring real-world situations to the lab, by developing and using naturalistic tasks that complement more traditional and controlled tasks. After studying high-level mathematical thinking in professional mathematicians, I now look at the conceptual changes that occur over the course of math education in children. I am addressing this question thanks to a combination of behavioral and fMRI methods.

Reba Rosenberg

Research Scientist

Yiqiao Wang

Graduate Student

[email protected]

My research interest is in the origin and early development of human mathematical knowledge. I'm interested in how young children acquire number concepts, how they learn the meanings of number words, and how natural language may foster the development of their number concepts.

Ganzhen Feng

Visiting Graduate Student

[email protected]

My primary research interest lies in children's spatial cognition and its development. Specifically, I am interested in how children represent the environment they navigate and how their abstract understanding of geometric information within the environment develops.