Finding our way
From research showing that adults in an Amazon village had about equal competence to Harvard students at basic geometry, Elizabeth Spelke drew a striking lesson. “Amazonian adults look like Harvard students, not like kids,” Spelke, a professor of psychology, told a packed room at the Barker Center Thursday night. “We learned that knowledge of Euclidian geometry can develop in the absence of schooling.” The surprising results from the study of Brazil’s Munduruku show that formal learning is not needed to develop navigational skills, said Spelke, director of the Laboratory for Developmental Studies. Spelke, whose lab is renowned for research into the development of language and other bedrock cognitive skills, focused in her talk on research into how animals and humans place themselves and navigate. The experiments involve spinning research subjects — whether humans or lab rats — until they lose their bearings, and studying how they reorient themselves in a spartan room. Infants and...