The Spiker Memorial Lecture honors Charles W. Spiker's influential research and educational leadership in the field of experimental child psychology. Following Spiker's death in 1993, his students and colleagues endowed this memorial lectureship to honor all that he stood for. Its purpose is to bring to Iowa today's outstanding minds in developmental psychology.

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Charles C. Spiker: A Pioneer in Experimental Child Psychology

The following paragraphs are adapted from the opening remarks by Joan Cantor for the Spiker Memorial Lecture on March 5, 1999.

Charles C. Spiker received his doctoral training at Iowa in the Child Welfare Research Station, later renamed the Institute of Child Behavior and Development. He immediately became a faculty member, later served as its Director for 11 years, eventually joined the Psychology faculty, and remained at Iowa for his entire career. He established one of the first doctoral programs in experimental child psychology, and began a brilliant research career directed at investigating the basic nature of learning in children. His ingenious experiments were done within the theoretical context of Hull-Spence theory. He made important extensions of the theory, quantified its axioms, and was highly successful in using parameter estimation techniques to fit theoretical learning curves to his data.

Spiker was not only a brilliant researcher, but also a remarkable teacher. His doctoral students populated the country with centers of excellence in experimental work with children. In 1986, Spiker was honored by his students and colleagues with a festschrift volume, a good deal of which was concerned with describing what Glenn Terrell called the "Spiker Effect" on student careers. Perhaps the best way to give you a sense of Spiker as a teacher is to provide some quotes from the volume:

“Classes were intellectual journeys guided by the clarity of Charlie’s analyses….The result was a kind of intellectual exhilaration that I always hoped I might impart to my students."

Frances Degen Horowitz

"Charlie is an inspiring teacher. He creates an atmosphere in which the student is caught up in the thrill of new theoretical ideas and the excitement of creating an empirical test of those ideas."

David Palermo

Spiker also served as an outstanding role model for young professors. Colleagues learned by his example that a good professor is both a teacher and a scholar, and is one who cooperates rather than competes with his colleagues. His love of teaching, coupled with his own unquenchable thirst for new knowledge, provided his students and colleagues with an unending opportunity to learn along with him, and to be a part of the intellectual excitement that surrounded him.

Glenn Terrell summed it up this way. “Simply stated, Charlie made all of us think. One way or another, he made us think about what we were saying and why, what we were writing and why, and even on occasion, what we were doing and why. He did this…within the bounds of honesty, to produce in his students a highly disciplined and thoughtful approach to psychology. Always the standards of performance for himself and for his students were extraordinarily high."

Spiker Memorial Lecturers

  • Yuko Munakata, PhD

    2023/2024

    University of California, Davis
    "Context Matters: The Case of Developing Inhibitory Control"

  • Catherine Tamis-Lemonda, PhD

    2022/2023

    New York University
    "The Mountain Stream of Learning and Development in Context"

  • Susan C. Levine, PhD

    2018/2019

    Rebecca Anne Boylan Professor in Education and Society
    University of Chicago
    "Variations in Young Children's Math Knowledge: Cognitive and Emotional Factors"

  • Harlene Hayne, PhD

    2016/2017

    Professor and Vice-Chancellor
    University of Otago
    "Out of the Mouths of Babes: Memory Development in Infants and Children"

  • Laurence Steinberg, PhD

    2014/2015

    Distinguished University Professor of Psychology
    Temple University
    "Age of Opportunity: Lessons From the New Science of Adolescence"

  • Charles Nelson, PhD

    2013/2014

    Professor of Pediatrics
    Harvard Medical School
    "The Effects of Early Deprivation on Brain and Behavioral Development"

  • Nathan Fox, PhD

    2012/2013

    Professor of Psychology
    University of Maryland
    "Attention and Executive Control Moderate Infant Temperament in the Development of Anxiety"

  • Joan Stiles, PhD

    2011/2012

    Professor of Cognitive Science
    University of California-San Diego
    "Neural Plasticity and Cognitive Development: Insights from Children with Perinatal Brain Injury"

  • Susan Goldin-Meadow, PhD

    2010/2011

    Professor of Psychology
    University of Chicago
    "How Our Hands Help Us Think"

  • Robert Lickliter, PhD

    2009/2010

    Professor of Psychology
    Florida International University
    "Development as Explanation: Phenotypic Canalization and Phenotypic Malleability Reconsidered"

  • Annette Karmiloff-Smith, PhD

    2008/2009

    Professorial Research Fellow 
    Birkbeck College 
    University of London
    "Modules, Genes and Evolution: Insights from Developmental Disorders"

  • Jeff Elman, PhD

    2007/2008

    Professor of Cognitive Science
    University of California, San Diego
    "On Dinosaur Bones and the Meaning of Words"

  • Stephen J. Suomi, PhD

    2005/2006

    Chief, Laboratory of Comparative Ethology
    National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, National Institute of Health
    "How Gene x Environment Interactions Shape the Development of Emotional Regulation in Rhesus Monkeys."

  • Les Cohen, PhD

    2004/2005

    Professor of Psychology
    University of Texas
    "The Development of Infant Causal Perception: Theoretical Issues and Empirical Evidence"

  • Dedre Gentner, PhD

    2003/2004

    Professor of Psychology
    Northwestern University
    "Analogical Learning"

  • Linda Smith, PhD

    2002/2003

    Chancellor's Professor of Psychology
    Indiana University
    "Symbolic Play, Early Word Learning, and Shape"

  • Richard Aslin, PhD

    2001/2002

    William R. Kenan Professor of Brain & Cognitive Sciences
    University of Rochester
    "Statistical Learning of Auditory and Visual Patterns by Human Infants, Adults, and Monkeys"

  • Megan Gunnar, PhD

    2000/2001

    Professor of Psychology
    Institute of Child Development
    University of Minnesota
    "The Psychobiology of Stress in Human Development"

  • Judy DeLoache, PhD

    1999/2000

    Professor of Psychology
    University of Illinois
    "Becoming Symbol-Minded"

  • Kurt W. Fischer, PhD

    1998/1999

    Professor of Human Development and Psychology
    Harvard University
    "The Dynamics of Cognitive and Brain Development"

  • Elizabeth Bates, PhD

    1997/1998

    Professor of Cognitive Science
    University of California, San Diego
    "Rethinking innateness: How the brain gets organized for language and other complicated things"

  • Robert S. Siegler, PhD

    1996/1997

    Professor of Psychology
    Carnegie-Mellon University
    "Microgenetic Studies of Cognitive Development"
    (Co-sponsored by the Sunleaf Lecture Fund)

  • Esther Thelen, PhD

    1995/1996

    Professor of Psychology
    Indiana University
    "Origins of an Embodied Cognition: The Dynamics of Moving, Perceiving, and Thinking in Infancy"

  • Sheldon H. White, PhD

    1994/1995

    Professor of Psychology
    Harvard University
    "A politics of science for psychology"

  • Lewis P. Lipsitt, PhD

    1993/1994

    Professor of Psychology
    Brown University
    "Advances in the Study of Infant Behavior and Development: A Hawkeye View"