Developmental Psychology: The Competent Fetus and Newborn

Vocabulary practice flashcards covering historical views of infancy, experimental methodologies, prenatal development, neonatal sensory-motor capacities, and early cognitive competence.

Retrospectively Constructed Infant

The psychoanalytic conception of infancy reconstructed from adult clinical recollections and unconscious fantasies, characterizing the baby as passive, defenceless, dominated by the Id, and subject to ceaseless conflict between instinctual desires and reality.

Alert Inactivity

A brief behavioral state lasting only $30\text{ minutes}$ to $1\text{ hour}$ per day in newborns, marked by relatively low motor activity and calm alertness, during which the infant is capable of orienting visual and auditory attention to stimuli.

Habituation Technique

An experimental paradigm where repeated presentations of an identical stimulus lead to decreased infant looking time or interest (habituation), followed by the presentation of a novel stimulus to evaluate recovery of attention (dishabituation) to assess perceptual discrimination.

Non-Nutritive Sucking Technique

A behavioral testing method in which infants modify their sucking speed and pressure on an electronic pacifier to trigger specific visual or auditory stimuli, allowing researchers to measure preference and perceptual discrimination.

Visual Preference Technique

A procedure measuring an infant's selective visual attention by presenting two stimuli simultaneously under controlled conditions to determine whether the infant discriminates between them and prefers one pattern (such as a normal face) over another (such as a scrambled face).

Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (NIRS)

A non-invasive functional neuroimaging method that monitors cortical activation in infants by measuring localized hemodynamic changes in oxygenated hemoglobin (Oxy-Hb) and total hemoglobin (Total-Hb).

Zygote Period

The earliest phase of prenatal development extending from $0$ to $3\text{ weeks}$ of gestation, concluding when the developing blastocyst implants into the uterine wall.

Embryo Period

The second phase of prenatal development spanning from $3$ to $8\text{ weeks}$ of gestation, marked by initial organogenesis and the onset of the heartbeat.

Fetus Period

The final prenatal period beginning at $9\text{ weeks}$ and continuing until birth, during which all primary organs are formed, active movements and sensory responsiveness emerge, and individual behavioral traits begin to manifest.

DeCasper and Spence (1986) Study

An experiment demonstrating prenatal auditory learning, where newborns $2-3\text{ days}$ after birth selectively altered their pacifier sucking to listen to a specific story their mothers had read aloud during the final $6\text{ weeks}$ of pregnancy rather than an unfamiliar story.

Motherese

An infant-directed speech style characterized by higher pitch, acoustic exaggeration, and slower tempo, which human newborns innately prefer over standard adult speech.

Phonemic Perceptual Narrowing

The developmental specialization process where infants can distinguish universal phonemes (such as "ba", "pa", "ma") at $2\text{ months}$ across any human language, but by $10\text{ months}$ restrict their discrimination capacity solely to the phonemic contrasts of their native linguistic environment.

Newborn Visual Acuity

The clarity of an infant's vision at birth, characterized by near-sightedness and an unaccommodating lens fixed at a focal distance of $30-40\,\text{cm}$, which improves to adult-equivalent acuity by $7-8\text{ months}$ of age.

Olfactory Discrimination (MacFarlane, 1975)

The sensory ability of neonates to detect scents, demonstrated by differential facial reactions to odors at $2\text{ days}$, a preference for breast milk scent at $5\text{ days}$, and a distinct preference for their biological mother's breast milk by $10\text{ days}$ postpartum.

Primitive Reflexes

Involuntary, stereotyped motor patterns elicited by specific sensory inputs that provide survival value during early life and gradually extinguish during the first half of the first year due to maturational cortical inhibition.

Rooting Reflex

An automatic survival reflex elicited by gently stroking a neonate's cheek or the corner of the mouth, causing the baby to turn the head toward the stimulus and open the mouth to locate the mother's nipple.

Moro Reflex

A sudden involuntary response triggered by a perceived loss of head support, causing the neonate to abduct and extend the arms, arch the spine, and extend the legs, immediately followed by flexing the limbs inward in an embracing motion with clenched fists.

Palmar Reflex

An involuntary grasp response initiated by pressure against the newborn's palm, producing a grip strong enough to support the infant's full body weight up to approximately $3\text{ months}$ of age.

Stepping Reflex

A motor reflex observed when an infant is supported in a vertical position with feet contacting a surface, generating rhythmic, alternating walking movements of the legs.

Prepared Relations

Genetically guided, neurobiologically hardwired predispositions present at birth that facilitate rapid cross-modal binding and early physical knowledge, counteracting Piaget's view that modalities develop in complete isolation.

Intermodal Perception

The cognitive capability to coordinate and transfer perceptual information across separate sensory channels, such as correlating oral-tactile textures with visual forms or matching auditory speech sounds to visible lip movements.

Haptic-Visual Transfer (Meltzoff and Borton, 1979)

An intermodal experiment where $1\text{-month-old}$ infants explored either a smooth or bumpy sphere pacifier orally without vision, and subsequently looked significantly longer at the visual object matching the shape they had previously explored by touch.

Causality Perception (Leslie, 1987)

A developmental paradigm showing that $6\text{-month-old}$ infants possess sensitivity to physical causality by habituating to direct billiard-ball collision events and dishabituating when shown spatiotemporal gaps or delays that disrupt immediate physical causation.

Violation of Expectation (Wynn, 1992)

A looking-time experiment evaluating early numerical and physical intuition, showing that $5\text{-month-old}$ infants look reliably longer at an impossible addition outcome ($1 + 1 = 1$) behind an occluder than at a possible mathematical outcome ($1 + 1 = 2$).