Psychology 130: Developmental Psychology - Prenatal, Biological, and Cognitive Development

Comprehensive vocabulary flashcards covering prenatal development, biological mechanisms of development, brain maturation, conceptual growth, cognitive developmental theories (Piaget, Information-Processing, Sociocultural), and infant perception and motor action.

Active Child

The developmental concept proposing that children actively contribute to and play an integral role in driving their own development.

Epigenetics

The study of stable changes in gene expression mediated by proteins and chemical markers that turn gene activity on and off without altering the underlying DNA sequence.

Genome

An individual's complete set of hereditary biological instructions and genetic material.

Gametes

Reproductive cells (the egg and sperm) that contain only half the genetic material found in other human cells ($23$ single chromosomes instead of $23$ pairs).

Conception

The union of an egg and a sperm cell, occurring when a sperm's head permeates the outer membrane of the egg, triggering a chemical barrier and the subsequent fusion of cell nuclei.

Zygote

The single-celled fertilized egg resulting from conception during weeks $0\text{--}1$ of prenatal development before embedding into the uterine lining.

Embryo

The developing organism from weeks $2\text{--}8$ of gestation, characterized by cell specialization, layer formation, and the emergence of major organs and bodily structures.

Fetus

The developing organism from weeks $9\text{--}38$ of gestation through birth, characterized by rapid growth, structural refinement, and the emergence of functional sensory systems and behaviors.

Monozygotic vs. Dizygotic Twins

Monozygotic (identical) twins result from the division of a single zygote and share $100\%$ of their genes; dizygotic (fraternal) twins develop from two separate eggs fertilized by two distinct sperm and share approximately $50\%$ of their genes.

Ectopic Pregnancy

A complication of pregnancy where the fertilized blastocyst implants outside the uterus, most commonly within a fallopian tube.

Placenta

A semipermeable gestational organ that facilitates the exchange of oxygen, nutrients, minerals, antibodies, and waste products between pregnant parent and fetus while preventing their circulatory blood supplies from mixing directly.

Neural Tube

A groove formed in the top layer of differentiated cells in the embryo during the fourth week that zips shut from the center outward to become the brain and spinal cord.

Cephalocaudal Development

A universal top-down pattern of prenatal and infant growth where structures and sensory capabilities closer to the head develop earlier than areas farther away.

Teratogen

Any external environmental agent, including toxic substances, drugs, diseases, and severe chronic maternal stress, that has the potential to induce harm or developmental abnormalities during prenatal growth.

Dose-Response Relation

A foundational pharmacological and developmental principle stating that the greater the exposure to a given teratogenic or environmental agent, the more severe the resulting effect is likely to be.

Apgar Score

A standard clinical assessment administered to newborns immediately after birth evaluating five vital signs: appearance (skin color), pulse (heart rate), grimace (reflex irritability), activity (muscle tone), and respiration.

Kangaroo Care

A therapeutic neonatal intervention involving continuous, direct skin-to-skin contact between a parent and a preterm or low-birth-weight infant to stabilize physiological vitals and promote development.

Colic

A clinical condition in young infants characterized by persistent, excessive, and inconsolable crying for several hours a day without any identifiable organic illness or clear external cause.

Range of Reaction

The phenotypic boundaries set by an individual's genotype, wherein an enriched or stimulating environment fosters the upper potential of a trait (e.g., IQ) while an unstimulating environment restricts expression to lower levels.

Food Neophobia

A developmental tendency characterized by an extreme unwillingness or hesitation to taste and accept unfamiliar foods.

Herd Immunity

The indirect protection from infectious disease that occurs when a sufficiently high proportion of a population is vaccinated, thereby containing contagion and shielding unvaccinated individuals.

Neuron

The fundamental cellular unit of the nervous system, comprised of a cell body (soma), dendrites that receive inputs, and an axon that conducts electrical action potentials to transmit signals across synapses.

Myelin Sheath

A fatty insulating layer formed around certain axons in the nervous system that dramatically accelerates the speed and efficiency of neuronal transmission.

Cerebral Cortex

The outer layer of gray matter constituting $80\%$ of the human brain, which plays a central role in sensory processing, motor control, complex thinking, and executive functioning.

Neurogenesis and Arborization

Neurogenesis is the proliferation and migration of new neurons; arborization is the subsequent expansion in size and complexity of dendritic branching and spine formation to heighten synaptic capacity.

Synaptogenesis and Synaptic Pruning

Synaptogenesis is the rapid proliferation of trillions of synaptic connections between neurons; synaptic pruning is the normative developmental elimination of underactivated synapses.

Neuroplasticity

The biological capacity of the brain to undergo structural and functional reorganization in response to experiential input, learning, or neurological injury.

Concepts

General mental representations and ideas that group objects, events, qualities, or relations on the basis of shared similarities, facilitating cognitive categorization and inductive inference.

Perceptual Categorization

The early cognitive grouping together of objects based on perceptual commonalities such as visual color, size, shape, and pattern of movement.

Causal Relations in Categorization

The principle that understanding functional cause-and-effect relations (e.g., biological functions of body parts like horns or wings) enables children to categorize and recall novel categories much more effectively than surface features alone.

Theory of Mind (ToM)

An organized developmental understanding of how underlying mental states—such as intentions, desires, beliefs, perceptions, and emotions—inform and drive human behavior.

False-Belief Problems

Experimental paradigms (such as the Smarties task) that assess whether a child understands that other individuals act in accordance with their own mental representations, even when those representations are factually mistaken.

Theory of Mind Module (TOMM)

A hypothesized, innately determined brain mechanism dedicated to tracking and interpreting other human minds, posited by nativist theorists.

Sociodramatic Play

A sophisticated form of pretend play emerging in early childhood wherein children collaborate to enact elaborate mini-dramas and assume complementary social roles.

Scale Error

An error committed by young toddlers attempting to perform a routine action on a miniature replica object that is physically impossible due to a failure to integrate perception of size with action planning.

Five Counting Principles

The foundational mathematical framework established by Gelman and Gallistel consisting of one-to-one correspondence, stable order, cardinality, order irrelevance, and abstraction.

Abstraction Principle

The counting principle specifying that any collection of discrete entities, events, or abstract objects can be counted together as a set.

Constructivism

Piaget's theoretical perspective asserting that children actively construct knowledge and build coherent internal mental schemes through personal hypothesis generation, active experimentation, and observation.

Sensorimotor Stage

Piaget's first developmental stage (birth to age $2$ years), in which infants explore, learn, and structure intelligence predominantly through direct perceptual input and motor reflexes.

Object Permanence

The cognitive realization that physical objects continue to exist in time and space even when they are obscured from immediate view or sensory perception.

A-not-B Error

The tendency of $8\text{--}12$-month-old infants to search for a hidden object in the original location where it was previously retrieved (Location A), even after watching it placed at a second site (Location B).

Preoperational Stage

Piaget's second stage (ages $2\text{--}7$ years), marked by rapid gains in symbolic representation and language, alongside cognitive constraints including egocentrism, centration, and lack of conservation.

Egocentrism

The cognitive inability of preoperational children to distinguish between their own subjective perspective and that of another person.

Piaget's Three-Mountain Task

A classic spatial and perspective-taking assessment used to demonstrate preoperational egocentrism by showing children cannot accurately identify a visual display viewed from an alternate vantage point.

Centration

The tendency of young children to fixate exclusively on one perceptually striking dimension of an object or problem while ignoring other equally relevant properties.

Conservation

The understanding that physical properties of an object or substance (such as volume, mass, or quantity) remain invariant despite changes in outward spatial appearance or shape.

Concrete Operational Stage

Piaget's third developmental stage (ages $7\text{--}12$ years), during which children become capable of logical operational thought concerning tangible, concrete entities, but struggle with purely hypothetical or abstract concepts.

Formal Operational Stage

Piaget's fourth developmental stage (age $12$ and beyond), characterized by the capacity to reason hypothetically, systematically evaluate deductive premises, and conduct formal scientific inquiries.

Assimilation, Accommodation, and Equilibration

Piagetian sources of continuity: assimilation incorporates new inputs into existing mental structures; accommodation modifies structures to fit contradictory information; equilibration balances the two to reach cognitive stability.

Executive Functioning

A family of top-down cognitive processes regulated by the prefrontal cortex, centered primarily on cognitive flexibility, working memory maintenance, and inhibitory control.

Overlapping Waves Theory

An information-processing model of problem solving showing that children simultaneously possess and employ multiple strategies across time, gradually selecting those that are most efficient and accurate.

Social Scaffolding

A sociocultural instruction method in which a more experienced social partner organizes tasks into manageable sub-steps, dynamically providing and weaning support to elevate the child's competence.

Joint Attention

A foundational social-cognitive process in which an infant and a caregiver coordinate their visual attention to focus intentionally on the same external third object or event.

Private Speech

Vygotsky's intermediate developmental phase in the internalization of thought, whereby children audibly talk to themselves to direct and scaffold their own behavior before internalizing this guidance as silent thought.

Perceptual Narrowing

A developmental process driven by environmental experience in which sensory discrimination becomes attuned to native stimuli (such as human faces or native phonemes) while discrimination for unencountered stimuli declines.

Auditory Localization

The ability to identify the precise origin and spatial direction of a sound, an ability present at birth that improves as the infant's head size expands and separates the ears.

Intermodal Perception

The capacity to integrate and synthesize sensory information received simultaneously from two or more sensory modalities into a coherent, unitary percept.

Neonatal Reflexes

Innate, stereotypic motor responses elicited by specific forms of sensory stimulation, including the rooting, sucking/swallowing, tonic neck, Moro, grasping, and stepping reflexes.