Human Development Lecture Flashcards

Vocabulary-style flashcards generated from lecture notes covering key terms, concepts, theories, and studies in lifespan human development.

Chronological age

The number of months or years since an individual's birth.

Developmental age

The chronological age at which most children show a particular level of physical or mental development.

Normative investigations

Research efforts designed to describe what is characteristic of a specific age or developmental stage.

Longitudinal design

A research design in which the same participants are observed repeatedly over an extended period of time.

Cross-sectional design

A research design in which groups of participants of different chronological ages are observed and compared at a single point in time.

Cohort

A group of people who develop in the same time period and are influenced by particular cultural and historical conditions.

Cohort effects

The effects of cultural-historical changes on the accuracy of findings in developmental research.

Cross-sequential design

A research methodology combining elements of cross-sectional and longitudinal designs by tracking multiple age cohorts across time.

Fluid intelligence

The global capacity to reason, learn new things, think abstractly, and solve novel problems without relying on formal education.

Crystallized intelligence

An individual's accumulated knowledge, vocabulary, and skills gained through prior learning and experience.

Transience

A memory deficit characterized by the tendency to lose access to stored information across time.

Absent-mindedness

A memory failure resulting from insufficient attention paid to information during encoding or retrieval.

Misattribution

Remembering a fact correctly but attributing it to an incorrect source or context.

Suggestibility

The tendency to incorporate false or misleading information provided by external sources into one's own memory recall.

Infantile amnesia

The inability of adults to remember events and experiences that occurred during the first two to three years of life.

Synaptogenesis

The rapid creation and explosion of synapse connections between neurons during early infancy and brain development.

Synaptic pruning

The neurological process of eliminating unused or unnecessary synaptic connections after a period of rapid brain growth.

Object permanence

The cognitive understanding that objects continue to exist independently of an individual's direct physical actions or sensory awareness.

Egocentrism

In Piaget's preoperational stage, the inability to take or comprehend another person's perspective or point of view.

Three Mountain Experiment

A classic test designed by Piaget to assess egocentrism by evaluating a child's ability to identify views of a scene from a perspective other than their own.

Conservation

The cognitive realization that physical properties (such as volume, mass, or number) remain identical despite superficial transformations in shape or appearance.

Mental operations

Actions performed internally within the mind that enable logical thinking and replace physical actions with cognitive reasoning.

Echolalia

An unusual speech pattern involving the literal repetition of words or phrases spoken by another person, commonly seen in Autism Spectrum Disorder.

Smarties task

A false-belief assessment task used to test whether a child understands that someone else can hold a belief that differs from reality.

Receptive-expressive discrepancy

A developmental pattern, also termed comprehension-production asymmetry, where a person's language comprehension significantly exceeds their spoken language capability.

Attachment

The enduring emotional bond formed between an infant and their primary caregiver.

Separation anxiety

The emotional distress displayed by infants when separated from their primary caregiver, typically peaking toward the end of the first year.

Marcia's Identity Status Model

A theoretical model categorizing adolescent identity formation into four statuses based on the dimensions of exploration and commitment.

Identity Foreclosure

An identity status in which an individual adopts a fixed identity chosen by authority figures or parents without personal exploration.

Moratorium

An identity status in which an individual actively explores various life goals, values, and roles before finalizing a commitment.

Identity Diffusion

An identity status characterized by a complete absence of both personal identity exploration and commitment to goals or values.

Generativity

A key middle adulthood developmental commitment focused on guiding, mentoring, and caring for the next generation, society, and career.

Stagnation

A state during middle adulthood characterized by self-absorption, lack of growth, and an inability to contribute meaningfully to others.

Alzheimer's disease brain pathology

Degenerative structural changes in the brain involving severe shrinkage of the hippocampus, enlargement of fluid-filled ventricles, and cortical shriveling.