integ: devpsych (development in infancy)

Neonatal Period

• a time of transition from intrauterine to extrauterine life

• first 4 weeks of a newborn’s life after birth

Fontanels

area on the baby’s head where bones do not meet to allow easy passage (gradually close in the first 18 months)

Lanugo

fuzzy prenatal hair

Vernix Caseosa

cheesy varnish, protects the baby against infection

Witch’s Milk

secretion that leaks from newborn’s breasts, believed to have magical properties

Anoxia

lack of oxygen

Hypoxia

reduced oxygen supply

Neonatal Jaundice

infant jaundice caused by immaturity of the liver

Sudden Infant Death Syndrome

sudden death of an infant under age 1

States of Arousal

infant's physiological and behavioral status at a given moment in the periodic daily cycle of wakefulness, sleep, and activity

Lateralization

specialization of the hemispheres

Reflex

automatic, innate response to stimulation

Primitive reflex

related to instinctive needs for survival and protection

postural reflex

reactions to changes in position or balance

Locomotor

voluntary movements that do not appear until months after the reflexes have disappeared

moro

darwinian

tonic neck

babkin

babinski

rooting

walking

swimming

• 2-10

• 3

• Field of peripheral vision is very narrow 

  • It doubles between how many weeks

  • Is well-developed by what months

4-5

Binocular vision does not develop until how many months

3

formal vision screening should begin by age what

32

By how many weeks of gestation, all body parts are sensitive to touch

5

Sensitivity increases during the first how many days of life

2

how many day old infants are able to recognize a word they heard up to a day earlier

1

At how many month, babies can distinguish sounds as close as ba and pa

11 to 17

By how many weeks, infants are able to both recognize and remember entire sentences after a brief delay

4

By how many months, infants respond preferentially to speech and music, especially that or their native language

Systems of Action

Increasingly complex combinations of motor skills, which permit a wider or more precise range of movement and more control of the environment

Denver Developmental Screening Test

Screening test given to children 1 month to 6 years old to determine whether they are developing normally

3½

At about how many months, most infants can grasp an object of moderate size

Social Referencing

learn to look to caregivers for clues as to whether a situation is secure or frightening

Visual Guidance

use of the eyes to guide hand movement

Depth Perception

• ability to perceive objects and surfaces in three dimensions

• cues involve not only binocular coordination but also motor control

Kinetic Cues

produced by movement of the object or the observer

Haptic perception

• ability to acquire information by handling objects rather than just looking at them

• At 28 weeks of gestation, infants were able to recognize and remember features of objects that were placed in their hands

• It is only after babies develop enough hand-eye coordination to reach for objects and grasp them (5-7 months) that they can use their sense of touch effectively to explore the objects within their reach

Ecological Theory of Perception

• We perceive the environment directly, and perception is shaped by the interaction between us and our surroundings.

• You don’t just passively receive information; you actively explore the environment and get information from it.

Dynamic Systems Theory

• how complex behaviors develop over time through the interaction of multiple factors

• Development is not linear—skills emerge from the body, brain, environment, and motivation working together

IQ Tests

measure intelligence by comparing it to the norm

Home Observation for Measurement of the Environment (HOME)

yes-or-no checklist that assess the child’s home environment

Primary Reflexes

• 0-1

• Infants are governed by reflexes

Primary Circular Reactions

• 1-4

• Infants repeat pleasurable actions discovered by chance

• Exploring the self

• ex: sucking thumb

Secondary Circular Reactions

• 4-8

• Infants repeat actions to get results beyond their own body

• Exploring the environment through objects

• ex: shaking a rattle

Coordination

• 8-12

• Infants repeat actions to reach a goal

• Using past experience to solve new problems

• Object permanence develops

• looks for hidden objects

Tertiary Circular Reactions

• 12-18

• Trial and Error

• “Little scientist”

• Intentional actions; can combine actions to achieve goals

Mental Representation

• 18-24

• Beginnings of representational ability

• Transitional stage to preoperational stage

• symbolic thought begins

• can use simple gestures or words to represent objects

Deferred Imitation

• reproduction of observed behavior after passage of time

• Babies remember what they saw and copy it later

Pictorial Competence

• ability to understand the nature of pictures

• It’s when a child knows that a picture stands for something in real life

2

By age what, children understand that a picture is both an object and a symbol

Scale Error

• momentary misperception of the relative sizes of objects

• The child misjudges the size of an object and acts as if it fits their body or actions

Dual Representation Hypothesis

• proposed that children under the age of 3 have difficulty grasping spatial relationships

• It is difficult for toddlers to simultaneously mentally represent both the actual object and its symbolic nature

• how children understand that a symbol can be both an object itself and a representation of something else

Information-Processing Approach

• focuses on perception, learning, memory, and problem solving

• views the mind like a computer: it takes in information, processes it, stores it, and produces output (behavior or decisions)
  How we pay attention, remember, think, and solve problems step by step

Habituation

• type of learning in which repeated or continuous exposure to a stimulus reduces attention to that stimulus

• Familiarity breeds loss of interest

• “Getting used to something” so it no longer grabs your attention

Dishabituation

increase in responsiveness after presentation of a new stimulus

Visual Preference

tendency to spend more time looking at one sight rather than another

Visual Recognition Memory

ability to distinguish a familiar visual stimulus from an unfamiliar one when shown both at the same time

Cross-Modal Transfer

ability to use information gained by one sense to guide another; most appear to be available at birth

ex: Baby touches a toy without seeing it, then recognizes it visually

Birth to 2 months

Infants' gaze duration increases

End of 1st year to 2nd year

Sustained attention becomes voluntary and task-oriented, with looking time plateauing or increasing for complex stimuli

Joint attention

develops between 10-12 months when babies follow adults' gaze

Cognitive Neuroscience Approach

seeks to identify what brain structures are involved in specific aspects of cognition

Implicit Memory

• unconscious recall of habits/skills (procedural)

• “Memory you just know how to do”

• ex: Riding a bike, Tying your shoes, Brushing your teeth, Baby sucking reflex or learning patterns without awareness

Explicit Memory

• conscious recall of facts, names, events (declarative)

• “Memory you can talk about”

• ex: Remembering your first day of school, Recalling a story you read, Knowing your home address 🏠

Guided Participation:

adult’s participation in a child’s activity that helps to structure it and bring the child’s understanding of it closer to the adult’s

Language

• communication system based on words and grammar

• Helps them communicate their needs, feelings, and ideas in order to exert more control over their lives

Prelinguistic Speech

• Forerunner of linguistic speech

• Utterance of sounds that are not words

• Includes crying, cooing, babbling, and accidental and deliberate imitation of sounds

Cooing

vowel sounds; 6 weeks and 3 months

Babbling

repeating consonant-vowel strings; occurs between 6-10 months

Phonemes

• smallest unit of sound in speech

• Sounds that make words different

Cat

Change /k/ → /b/

Bat

5

By how many months, infants tend to listen longer to their name than to other names

Holophrase

single word that conveys a complete thought depending on the context (Daddy? → Where is Daddy?)

Receptive Vocabulary

• what infants understand; continues to grow as verbal comprehension gradually develops

• Words you understand, but may not say

  A parent asks “Give me the ball”

  Child understands “ball” and hands it over

  Reading a story

  Child recognizes “dog” and “tree” even if they can’t say it

  Classroom instruction

  Child understands “sit,” “stand,” “jump”

Telegraphic Speech

• early form of sentence use consisting of few essential words

• “Short sentences with only key words”

18–24 months

“Want juice”

“I want some juice”

2–3 years

“Go park”

“I want to go to the park”

2–3 years

“Mommy help”

“Mommy, please help me”

Syntax

• fundamental rules for putting sentences together

• How we put words together so they make sense

Language Acquisition Device

human’s inborn biological capacity for language, which predisposes them to acquire language

Universal Grammar

• proposed that all human language share a deep structure rooted in a set of grammatical rules and categories

• Grammatical rules are hardwired in human brain

• Helps humans learn language

Poverty of the Stimulus

there is an insufficiency in the linguistic input received by young children

Overregularization

• occurs when children inappropriately apply syntactic rule (Daddy goed to the store)

• “Using a rule too much”

Regular Rule	Child’s Overregularization	Correct Form
Past tense: add -ed	“goed”	went
Plurals: add -s	“mouses”	mice
Past tense: add -ed	“eated”	ate
Plurals: add -s	“foots”	feet

Code Mixing

 use of elements of 2 languages

Code Switching

changing one’s speech to match the situations

Personality

• relatively consistent blend of emotions, temperament, thought, and behavior that makes each person unique

• Reflect both inborn and environmental influences

• Affect the way children respond to others and adapt to their world

Crying

primary way in which infants communicate their needs and is considered to be an honest signal of need

Basic Hunger Cry

Rhythmic cry with pauses for breathing,  which is not always associated with hunger

Baby cries softly when hungry → feeding stops the cry

Angry Cry

• Variation of the rhythmic cry, in which excess air is forced through the vocal cords

• Sudden bursts of loud cries

Pain Cry

• Sudden onset of loud crying without preliminary moaning, sometimes followed by holding the breath

• Piercing, shrill

Frustration Cry

• Two or three drawn-out cries, with no prolonged breath-holding

• Starts and stops, like whining

• Whiny, intermittent, less intense

Social Smiling:

when newborn infants gaze and smile at their parents (2nd month)

Clowning

silly, nonverbal behaviors used to elicit smiles and laughs from children

Reflexive Smile

a smile that does not occur in response to external stimuli and appear during the first month after birth

Anticipatory Smiling

infants smile at an object and then gaze at an adult while continuing to smile (12-15 months)

Altruistic Behavior

acting out of concern with no expectation of reward

Temperament

• an early-appearing, biologically based tendency to respond to the environment in predictable ways

• natural style of thinking, feeling, and behaving—the way they react to the world and regulate their emotions.

• “The way a person naturally responds to people and situations”

Easy Children

generally happy, rhythmic in biological functioning, and accepting of new experiences

Difficult Children

more irritable and harder to please

Slow-to-Warm-Up Children

mild but slow to adapt to new people and situations

Goodness of Fit

the match between a child’s temperament and the environmental demands and constraints the child must deal with