Babies arrive with a starter kit of knowledge, not a blank slate

Elizabeth Spelke's 'core knowledge' research found that infants only months old already expect objects to persist when hidden, to move along continuous paths, and to behave differently from self-propelled agents. These aren't learned from scratch — they look like built-in cognitive foundations that later learning builds on top of.

— Elizabeth S. Spelke, Core Knowledge — American Psychologist, 2000