Development, Sensation, and Perception

Comprehensive vocabulary flashcards covering Lifespan Development (Ch. 5) and Sensation & Perception (Ch. 6).

Developmental Psychology

The study of physical, cognitive, and social development throughout the life span.

Cross-Sectional Study

A research design that measures individuals of various ages at one point in time to provide information about age differences.

Longitudinal Study

A research design that measures a single individual or group of individuals over an extended period to provide information about age changes.

Cross-Sequential Study

A research design that combines aspects of both cross-sectional and longitudinal research to help address their respective limitations.

Fetus

The developing human organism from $9$ weeks after conception until birth.

Teratogens

Environmental dangers, such as viruses and drugs, that can cross the placenta and cause damage to an embryo or fetus during prenatal development.

Rooting Reflex

An inborn newborn skill in which an infant turns its head toward a touch on the cheek or mouth in search of food.

Schema

A concept or framework identified by Jean Piaget that an individual creates to organize and interpret information.

Assimilation

In Piaget's cognitive theory, the process of absorbing new information into existing schemas.

Accommodation

In Piaget's cognitive theory, the process of adjusting old schemas or developing new ones to better fit with new information.

Sensorimotor Stage

Piaget's first stage of cognitive development (birth to nearly $2$ years), in which infants experience the world through senses and actions such as looking, hearing, touching, mouthing, and grasping.

Object Permanence

The developmental milestone typically emerging around $8$ months of age in which a child recognizes that things continue to exist even when out of sight.

Preoperational Stage

Piaget's second stage of cognitive development (about $2$ to $6$ or $7$ years), in which children represent things with words and images and use intuitive rather than logical reasoning.

Egocentrism

The cognitive inability characteristic of the preoperational stage to take another person's perspective or point of view.

Theory of Mind

The ability to take another's perspective and to infer others' mental states, intentions, feelings, and beliefs.

Concrete Operational Stage

Piaget's third stage of cognitive development (about $7$ to $11$ years), in which children gain the mental operations that enable them to think logically about concrete events, perform arithmetical transformations, and understand conservation.

Conservation

The understanding that properties such as mass, volume, and number remain the same despite changes in the outward forms or appearance of objects.

Formal Operational Stage

Piaget's final stage of cognitive development (about $12$ through adulthood), characterized by the ability to reason abstractly, handle hypothetical-deductive reasoning, and engage in mature moral reasoning.

Harlow's Surrogate Mother Experiment

A 1958 research study showing that infant rhesus monkeys separated from their mothers preferred a soft cloth surrogate mother over a wire mother providing milk, demonstrating the paramount role of contact comfort in attachment.

Authoritative Parenting Style

A confrontive parenting style where parents enforce rules, limits, and standards, but also explain, discuss, listen, and express respect for the child's ideas and wishes.

Authoritarian Parenting Style

A coercive parenting style where parents impose rules 'because I said so' and demand strict obedience.

Permissive Parenting Style

An unrestraining parenting style where parents submit to their children's desires, without enforcing limits or standards for child behavior.

Negligent Parenting Style

An uninvolved parenting style where parents are careless, inattentive, and do not seek a close relationship with their children.

Preconventional Morality

Lawrence Kohlberg's initial level of moral reasoning (before age $9$) centered on self-interest; obeying rules to avoid punishment or gain concrete rewards.

Conventional Morality

Lawrence Kohlberg's second level of moral reasoning (early adolescence) focused on upholding laws and rules to gain social approval or maintain social order.

Postconventional Morality

Lawrence Kohlberg's highest level of moral reasoning (adolescence and beyond) where actions reflect a belief in basic human rights and self-defined ethical principles.

Moral Intuition

The view that moral decisions are primarily driven by fast, automatic gut feelings or emotions (such as disgust or joy) rather than formal deliberations.

Identity vs. Role Confusion

Erik Erikson's adolescent stage (teen years into $20$s) where teenagers refine a sense of self by testing roles and integrating them to form a single identity, or become confused about who they are.

Intimacy vs. Isolation

Erik Erikson's young adulthood stage ($20$s to early $40$s) where adults struggle to form close relationships and gain the capacity for intimate love, or feel socially isolated.

Generativity vs. Stagnation

Erik Erikson's middle adulthood stage ($40$s to $60$s) where adults discover a sense of contributing to the world through family and work, or feel a lack of purpose.

Integrity vs. Despair

Erik Erikson's late adulthood stage (late $60$s and up) where older adults reflect on their lives and feel either a sense of satisfaction or failure.

Alzheimer's Disease

A neurocognitive disorder characterized by the progressive loss of brain cells and neural networks, deterioration of acetylcholine neurons, and amyloid plaques, leading to dramatic shrinking of the brain.

Prosopagnosia

A neurological condition characterized by the inability to recognize faces, also known as face blindness.

Developmental Prosopagnosia

A form of face blindness whose onset occurs prior to the development of normal adult-level face recognition abilities, which typically develop during the teenage years.

Acquired Prosopagnosia

A form of face blindness in an individual who previously possessed normal adult-level face recognition abilities, caused by subsequent brain damage.

Sensation

The process of receiving, translating, and transmitting raw sensory information from the external and internal environments to the brain.

Perception

The process of selecting, organizing, and interpreting sensory data so the brain can make sense of input from sensory organs.

Reception

The initial step of sensation involving the stimulation of sensory receptor cells by physical energy such as sound, light, or heat.

Transduction

The second step of sensation, which involves transforming receptor cell stimulation into neural impulses.

Transmission

The third step of sensation, defined as delivering neural information to the brain to be processed.

Absolute Threshold

The minimum level of stimulus intensity needed to detect a stimulus $50\%$ of the time.

Subliminal

Referring to any sensory stimulus that falls below the absolute threshold and is not detected at least half the time.

Sensory Adaptation

The diminishing sensitivity to an unchanging, constant stimulus over time, allowing sensory systems to focus on novelty.

Rods

Retinal photoreceptors located in the periphery that detect black and white in dim lighting and outnumber cones approximately $20$ to $1$.

Cones

Retinal photoreceptors clustered in the center of the retina that detect sharp details and colors in bright light.

Fovea

The central focal point in the retina where the eye's cones are concentrated.

Trichromatic Theory

The theory of color vision operating early in the retina, stating that three different types of cones are maximally sensitive to short, medium, or long wavelengths, and their relative activity levels determine color perception.

Opponent-Process Theory

The theory of color vision operating later in the visual pathway, stating that three mechanisms respond positively and negatively to specific color pairs (red-green, blue-yellow, black-white).

Cochlea

The coiled, bony, fluid-filled inner ear structure containing hair cell receptors that trigger nerve impulses along the auditory nerve in response to sound vibrations.

Kinesthesis

The sensory system that detects the position and movement of individual body parts via proprioceptors located in joints, tendons, and muscles.

Vestibular Sense

The sensory system monitoring head and whole-body position, movement, and balance via hair-like cilia in the inner ear's semicircular canals and vestibular sacs.

Umami

The fifth basic taste sensation that identifies proteins necessary to grow and repair tissue.

Selective Attention

The perceptual process of filtering out unimportant sensory messages to attend to specific sensory stimuli while ignoring others.

Feature Detectors

Specialized neurons in the brain that respond selectively to specific characteristics of a stimulus, such as lines, angles, shapes, or movement.

Habituation

The brain's tendency to ignore or cease responding to sensory stimuli that remain constant over time.

Figure-Ground

A Gestalt organizational principle where the visual field is separated into distinct objects (the figure) that stand out against the background (the ground), with ground seen as farther away.

Retinal Disparity

A binocular cue for perceiving depth; because our two eyes are slightly separated, each retina receives a slightly different image, allowing the brain to compute distance.

Convergence

A binocular depth cue based on the neuromuscular tension created as the eyes turn inward when focusing on a nearby object.

Visual Cliff

A laboratory apparatus used to test depth perception in infants and young animals by simulating a steep drop-off covered by sturdy glass.

Perceptual Constancy

The ability to perceive objects as having stable size, shape, brightness, and color despite continuous changes in sensory input and retinal images.

Ames Room Illusion

A specially designed distorted room that manipulates monocular depth cues, causing two people of equal size standing in opposite corners to appear dramatically different in stature.

Perceptual Adaptation

The visual ability to adjust to an artificially displaced or inverted visual field, such as when wearing prism glasses.

Perceptual Set

A mental predisposition or readiness to perceive sensory stimuli in a particular manner based on expectations, context, or schemas.

Bottom-Up Processing

Sensory processing that begins at the entry level with sensory receptors and works up to higher levels of brain processing to assemble and integrate information.

Top-Down Processing

Information processing guided by higher-level mental operations, such as when we use models, prior ideas, and expectations to interpret sensory input.