The Spelke lab focuses on the sources of our uniquely human ability to learn both rapidly and flexibly, in domains ranging from formal mathematics, to map-guided navigation to common sense reasoning about objects, people, and social groups. Spelke studies the origins and growth of these and other abilities in human infants and children, by comparing their capacities to those of nonhuman primates and other model animals, as well as to the capacities of children and adults living in different circumstances, including first-generation school children in poor regions of India, and Amazonian children with limited access to any formal schooling. Current projects investigate: (1) how infants and children reason about abstract properties of objects such as their masses and the forces that act upon them;  (2) how infants and children reason about abstract properties of the goal-directed actions of agents, such as the costs of their actions and the value of the goal states that they achieve; and (3) how children bridge from intuitive to formal mathematics, by creating and evaluating interventions aimed to enhance poor children’s readiness for school math learning.  The core of Spelke’s research uses behavioral methods and laboratory-based tasks to investigate the concepts and cognitive capacities of infants, children and adults. Through collaborations with anthropologists, behavioral biologists, cognitive neuroscientists, computer scientists, economists, and educators, she has extended her studies of human cognitive capacities to a broader range of populations, settings, and methods.