FRHD*1010: Human Development - Infancy, Childhood, and Adolescence

Comprehensive vocabulary flashcards covering the major physical, cognitive, and socioemotional developmental milestones, theories, and empirical research across infancy, childhood, and adolescence.

Cephalocaudal Pattern

The developmental sequence in which physical growth and feature differentiation work from top to bottom, with the head, eyes, and brain growing faster than the lower parts of the body.

Proximodistal Pattern

The sequence in which growth starts at the centre of the body and moves toward the extremities, such as infants controlling their trunk and arms before controlling their hands and fingers.

Lateralization

The specialization of function in one hemisphere of the cerebral cortex or the other.

Four Lobes of the Cerebral Cortex

The distinct anatomical regions found in each hemisphere of the cerebral cortex: the frontal lobes, occipital lobes, temporal lobes, and parietal lobes, each differing in function and anatomy.

Dynamic Systems Theory

A perspective holding that motor skills develop through an active process where action is motivated by perception and infants assemble behaviours to achieve a goal, linking motor, social, and cognitive domains.

Habituation and Dishabituation

Habituation is the decreased responsiveness to a stimulus after repeated presentations, whereas dishabituation is the recovery of a habituated response following a change in stimulation.

Visual Cliff

An experimental apparatus devised by Eleanor Gibson and Richard Walk (1960) to test infant depth perception by determining whether they would crawl across a sheet of glass over an apparent visual drop-off.

Assimilation (Piaget)

The cognitive process wherein children incorporate new information into their existing schemas or understandings.

Accommodation (Piaget)

The cognitive process wherein children adjust their existing schemas to account for new information and experiences.

Object Permanence

The Piagetian term for the understanding that objects continue to exist even when they cannot directly be seen, heard, or touched, typically developing around 8 to 9 months of age.

Broca's Area and Wernicke's Area

Broca's area is an area located in the left frontal lobe involved in speech production; Wernicke's area is a portion of the left temporal lobe involved in language comprehension.

Social Referencing

The process emerging around 12 months of age where infants read emotional cues in others to help determine how to act in a specific situation or event.

Behavioural Inhibition (Kagan)

A temperament category identified by Jerome Kagan wherein an infant reacts to unfamiliarity with initial avoidance, distress, or subdued affect, placing them at higher risk for social anxiety disorder later in life.

Effortful Control (Rothbart and Bates)

A dimension of temperament involving self-regulation and executive attention, enabling an infant to inhibit a dominant response in favour of a more adaptive, subdominant response.

Goodness of Fit

The match between an infant's temperament and the environmental demands the infant must cope with.

Trust versus Mistrust

Erik Erikson's first psychosocial stage occurring during the first year of life, in which infants learn whether their caregivers provide consistent, reliable care.

Strange Situation

An observational measure of infant attachment created by Mary Ainsworth that requires the infant to move through a series of introductions, separations, and reunions with their caregiver and an adult stranger.

Reciprocal Socialization

Bidirectional socialization in which children socialize their parents just as parents socialize their children within a system of interacting family subsystems.

Preoperational Stage

Piaget's second developmental stage, lasting from approximately 2 to 7 years of age, where children begin representing the world with words, images, and drawings, but cannot yet perform mental operations.

Egocentrism

The inability to distinguish between one's own perspective and someone else's perspective, prominent during Piaget's preoperational stage.

Animism

The preoperational belief that inanimate objects have lifelike qualities and are capable of action.

Conservation Task (Piaget)

A test designed to determine whether a child recognizes that altering an object's or substance's appearance (such as pouring liquid into a taller, thinner beaker) does not change its basic properties.

Concrete Operational Stage

Piaget's third developmental stage (ages 7 to 11), in which children can perform mental operations and reason logically about concrete events and objects, successfully solving conservation tasks.

Seriation and Transitivity

Cognitive skills acquired in the concrete operational stage: seriation is the ability to order stimuli along a quantitative dimension, while transitivity is the ability to logically combine relations to understand necessary conclusions.

Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD)

Vygotsky's concept defining the range of tasks that are too difficult for a child to master alone but can be learned with the guidance and assistance of an adult or more skilled peer.

Scaffolding

The pedagogical practice of adjusting the level of guidance and support to fit the learner's current performance level, gradually reducing assistance as competence increases.

Fuzzy Trace Theory

A theory stating that memory is best understood through two types of memory representations: verbatim memory traces (precise, fragile details) and gist traces (the central, general idea of the information).

Theory of Mind

The developmental awareness that other people have internal mental states, desires, beliefs, and thoughts that are distinct from one's own.

Intelligence Quotient (IQ)

A standardized measure of intelligence calculated as mental age (MA) divided by chronological age (CA) multiplied by 100: $\text{IQ} = \frac{\text{MA}}{\text{CA}} \times 100$.

Triarchic Theory of Intelligence (Sternberg)

Robert J. Sternberg's theory proposing that intelligence comes in three distinct forms: analytical intelligence, creative intelligence, and practical intelligence.

Fast-Mapping

A process that helps explain how young children learn the connection between a word and its referent after only a brief encounter with that word.

Pragmatics

The social and cultural rules governing the appropriate and effective use of language in different contexts.

Initiative versus Guilt

Erikson's third psychosocial stage, occurring during early childhood, where children use their perceptual, motor, and cognitive skills to make things happen and develop a sense of ambition, risking guilt if made to feel irresponsible.

Industry versus Inferiority

Erikson's fourth psychosocial stage, occurring in middle and late childhood, wherein children are encouraged in their efforts to build, master skills, and work, developing pride or feelings of inadequacy.

Self-Efficacy

An individual's personal belief that they can master a situation and produce favourable, successful outcomes.

Baumrind's Parenting Styles

A four-part typology of parenting based on acceptance/responsiveness and demandingness/control: authoritative, authoritarian, indulgent (permissive), and neglectful (uninvolved).

Emotion-Coaching versus Emotion-Dismissing

Two parenting approaches to children's negative feelings: emotion-coaching parents monitor emotions, view negative feelings as teaching opportunities, and label them; emotion-dismissing parents deny, ignore, or attempt to quickly change negative emotions.

Puberty

A period of rapid physical maturation involving hormonal and bodily changes that take place primarily in early adolescence, leading to sexual maturity and reproductive capacity.

HPG Axis

The feedback system consisting of the hypothalamus, pituitary gland, and gonads that regulates hormone secretion (such as testosterone and estradiol) and drives pubertal development.

Menarche

A female's first menstrual period, which occurs relatively late in the pubertal cycle.

Anorexia Nervosa

An eating disorder characterized by the relentless pursuit of thinness through starvation, an intense fear of gaining weight, and a distorted body image.

Bulimia Nervosa

An eating disorder characterized by a binge-and-purge pattern in which the individual consistently eats excessively and then induces vomiting or uses laxatives.

Formal Operational Stage

Piaget's fourth and final cognitive developmental stage, beginning in adolescence, characterized by abstract, idealistic, and logical thought.

Hypothetical-Deductive Reasoning

Piaget's formal operational concept that adolescents have the cognitive capability to formulate hypotheses about ways to solve problems and systematically deduce the best path to reach a solution.

Adolescent Egocentrism

The heightened self-consciousness of adolescents, comprising the imaginary audience (the belief that others are as obsessed with them as they are) and the personal fable (a sense of personal uniqueness and invulnerability).

Hot Cognition / Stroop Task

Reasoning and decision-making carried out under emotionally charged or high-arousal conditions, which shows a temporary dip in inhibitory control during adolescence compared to cool, neutral cognitive tasks.

Top-Dog Phenomenon

The circumstance of moving from the top position in a school (such as the oldest, biggest, and most powerful in elementary school) to the lowest position (as the youngest and smallest in middle or high school).

Service Learning

A form of education promoting social responsibility and community service by engaging adolescents in activities like tutoring, volunteering in hospitals, or community clean-ups combined with structured reflection.

Psychosocial Moratorium

Erikson's term for the gap between childhood security and adult autonomy that allows adolescents to experiment with different roles and identities before committing.

Marcia's Four Identity Statuses

James Marcia's framework classifying identity formation based on the presence or absence of crisis (exploration) and commitment: identity diffusion, identity foreclosure, identity moratorium, and identity achievement.

García Coll's Integrative Ecological Model

A conceptual framework proposed by Cynthia García Coll and colleagues for studying the development of ethnic minority youth that incorporates social position variables, racism, segregation, and adaptive culture.

Cliques versus Crowds

Cliques are small peer groups (2 to 12 individuals) usually of the same sex and similar age who share intimacy, while crowds are larger, less personal groups based on reputation or shared activities.

Sensation Seeking

The tendency to seek novel, varied, and intense experiences and the willingness to take risks for such experiences, which peaks in middle adolescence before self-regulatory control fully matures.