Chapters 3 & 4 - Infancy Physical, Cognitive, and Socioemotional Development

Comprehensive vocabulary flashcards covering developmental milestones, neurological processes, motor skills, perceptual abilities, cognitive milestones, and socioemotional attachments across infancy.

Cephalocaudal pattern

The sequence in which the earliest growth and physical development proceed from the top down, meaning 'head to tail,' explaining why the head grows faster than lower body parts and infants see objects before controlling their torso.

Proximodistal pattern

The growth sequence starting at the centre of the body and moving toward the extremities, meaning 'near to far,' which explains why infants control their trunk and arms before their hands and fingers.

Myelination

The process of encasing nerve axons with fat cells that begins prenatally and continues through childhood and adolescence, speeding up neural transmission and increasing communication efficiency.

Lateralization

The specialization of function in one hemisphere of the cerebral cortex or the other, such as left hemisphere dominance for speech production and comprehension and right hemisphere involvement in emotional cues, rhythm, and metaphor.

Neuroconstructivist view

A perspective emphasizing the dynamic interplay between biological processes, brain development, and cognitive development, where neural activity shapes brain development and brain development constrains cognitive abilities.

Bucharest Early Intervention Project

A study demonstrating that children raised in institutional orphanages had depressed brain activity compared to those placed in foster care, highlighting the negative consequences of early environmental deprivation.

Rooting reflex

An infant reflex where stroking the cheek or side of the mouth causes the baby to turn its head, open its mouth, and begin sucking; it disappears after $3$–$4$ months.

Moro reflex

A startle response to sudden stimulation (such as a loud noise or being dropped) in which the infant arches their back, throws their head back, flings out arms and legs, and rapidly pulls them back to the centre of the body; it disappears after $3$–$4$ months.

Babinski reflex

An infant reflex where stroking the sole of the foot causes the infant to fan out their toes and twist the foot inward; it disappears after $9$ months to $1$ year.

Tonic neck reflex

A response occurring when an infant is placed on their back, where they form fists with both hands and usually turn their head to the right (known as the 'fencer's pose'); it disappears after $2$ months.

Ecological view (Perception)

The theoretical approach emphasizing that perception is designed for action, providing crucial environmental information that guides how and when to move or interact with objects.

Visual preference method

A research procedure designed to measure infant perception by observing whether infants look longer at patterned stimuli compared to plain stimuli, indicating visual discrimination.

Habituation

Decreased responsiveness to a stimulus following repeated presentations, indicating that an infant is no longer interested in or has fully encoded the stimulus.

Dishabituation

The recovery of a habituated response when a novel stimulus is introduced, demonstrating an infant's ability to discriminate between two distinct stimuli.

Intermodal perception

The ability to relate and integrate information across two or more sensory modalities simultaneously, such as combining visual and auditory cues.

Perceptual narrowing

A developmental process whereby infants lose the ability to differentiate stimuli they are not routinely exposed to (such as other-species faces or non-native language phonemes) as their perceptual systems specialize.

Sleeper effect

The phenomenon where the consequences of an early experience or early sensory deprivation do not become evident until much later in development.

Schemas

In Piaget's theory, actions or mental representations that organize knowledge, which in infancy are structured by simple sensorimotor actions on objects such as sucking, looking, and grasping.

Assimilation

Piagetian concept of incorporating new information or experiences into existing schemas (e.g., a toddler calling all vehicles 'cars').

Accommodation

Piagetian concept of adjusting existing schemas or creating new ones to account for new information or experiences (e.g., refining the category of 'cars' to exclude motorcycles and trucks).

Sensorimotor Stage

Piaget's first cognitive developmental stage, extending from birth to approximately $2$ years of age, during which infants construct an understanding of the world by coordinating sensory experiences with motor actions.

Object permanence

The cognitive understanding that objects continue to exist even when they cannot be seen, heard, or touched directly.

A-not-B error

A mistake made by infants who search for a hidden object in its initial hiding place ($A$) rather than in a newer hiding place ($B$), despite observing the object being moved.

Core knowledge approach

A domain-specific view stating that infants are pre-wired from birth with innate knowledge systems (such as space, number sense, object permanence, and language) shaped by evolution.

Joint attention

An interaction where two individuals track and focus on the same object or event, facilitating learning from others and predicting later executive function and language development.

Deferred imitation

The replication of an action witnessed in the past after a delay of hours or days, serving as a key indicator of explicit memory in infancy.

Infantile amnesia

The inability of adults to remember events from the first $3$ years of their lives, largely caused by the structural immaturity of the prefrontal lobes during infancy.

Mutual exclusivity bias

A word-learning constraint where infants assume that each object has only one label, mapping novel words onto novel objects.

Shape bias

The tendency of young children to generalize a newly learned word to other objects based on shared shape rather than shared size or texture.

Telegraphic speech

The use of short, precise words without grammatical markers to express ideas, commonly seen in early multiword utterances like 'see doggie' or 'more milk.'

Broca's area

An area located in the left frontal lobe of the brain involved in speech production; damage causes expressive aphasia where speech production is impaired while comprehension remains intact.

Wernicke's area

A region in the left hemisphere of the brain involved in language comprehension; damage produces receptive aphasia characterized by fluent but nonsensical speech and poor comprehension.

Infant-directed speech (Parentese)

A communication style spoken in a higher pitch, slower tempo, and exaggerated intonation using simple words and sentences to capture infant attention and facilitate language learning.

Recasting

A language-teaching technique of rephrasing an infant's utterance into a question or restating it in a fully grammatical sentence.

Expanding

Restating an infant's speech in a linguistically sophisticated, more complete form (e.g., replying 'Yes, the doggie is eating' when the child says 'Doggie eat').

Primary emotions

Emotions that appear within the first $6$ months of an infant's life, including surprise, interest, joy, anger, sadness, fear, and disgust.

Social referencing

The process of 'reading' emotional cues in caregivers or others to determine appropriate responses and actions in novel or ambiguous situations.

Effortful Control (EC)

A temperament dimension involving executive attention mechanisms to voluntarily inhibit a dominant response in favour of a subdominant one, enabling self-soothing and arousal regulation.

Goodness of fit

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

Internal working model of attachment

Bowlby's concept of a cognitive mental framework of the caregiver, the infant-caregiver relationship, and the self as deserving of nurturant care, which guides future interpersonal interactions.

Securely attached

An attachment classification where an infant uses the caregiver as a secure base to explore, shows mild distress upon separation, and quickly re-establishes positive interaction upon the caregiver's return.

Insecure avoidant

An attachment style characterized by infants avoiding the caregiver, exhibiting minimal distress during departure, and ignoring or leaning away from the caregiver upon reunion.

Insecure resistant

An attachment style where infants cling to the caregiver, exhibit extreme distress upon departure, and resist comfort by pushing away or fighting closeness upon the caregiver's return.

Insecure disorganized

An attachment style in which infants show confusion, dazed expressions, extreme fearfulness, and disoriented behaviours around their caregivers, often linked to caregiver neglect or trauma.

Developmental cascade model

A framework demonstrating how cumulative connections across biological, cognitive, socioemotional, and contextual domains over time influence developmental pathways and life outcomes.

Reciprocal socialization

A bidirectional form of socialization where children influence and socialize their parents just as parents influence and socialize their children.

Synchrony

Caregiver-infant interactions featuring temporally connected, mutually contingent exchanges where both partners match emotional states and learn interactive skills like turn-taking.

Scaffolding

A parental support technique where temporary guidance is adjusted to the child's level of competence, helping the infant master new tasks during stages like autonomy versus shame and doubt.