Developmental Psychology: Brain, Motor, Perception, and Cognitive Stages

Cephalocaudal trend

A pattern of physical growth where the head develops more rapidly than the lower part of the body. By age 2, the lower portion of the body begins to catch up.

Proximodistal trend

A pattern of physical growth where growth proceeds from the center of the body outward.

Neurons

Nerve cells that store and transmit information.

Synapses

Tiny gaps between neurons.

Neurotransmitters

Chemicals released by neurons that send messages across synapses.

Programmed cell death

A process in brain growth that makes space for neural fibers and synapses.

Synaptic pruning

A process that returns neurons to an uncommitted state to support future development.

Lateralization

The specialization of the hemispheres of the cerebral cortex.

Left hemisphere

In most people, responsible for verbal activities and positive emotion.

Right hemisphere

Handles spatial abilities and negative emotion.

Handedness

The most obvious reflection of cerebral lateralization in humans.

Brain plasticity

The ability of the brain to reorganize areas committed to specific functions.

Experience-expectant brain growth

Brain growth that depends on ordinary experiences.

Experience-dependent brain growth

Additional growth as a result of specific learning experiences.

Electroencephalogram (EEG)

Used to examine brain-wave patterns for stability and organization.

Event-related potentials (ERPs)

Used to detect the general location of brain-wave activity.

Marasmus

A condition of malnutrition resulting from a diet low in all essential nutrients.

Kwashiorkor

A condition of malnutrition resulting from an unbalanced diet very low in protein.

Weight faltering (Failure to thrive)

A condition in which a child's weight is substantially below growth norms, and the child is withdrawn and apathetic.

Reinforcer (Operant Conditioning)

A stimulus that increases the occurrence of a response.

Punishment (Operant Conditioning)

Removing a desirable stimulus or presenting an unpleasant one to decrease the occurrence of a response.

Habituation

A gradual reduction in the strength of a response due to repetitive stimulation.

Recovery

The return to a high level of responsiveness when a new stimulus is introduced after habituation.

Novelty preference

Recovery to a new stimulus, which assesses recent memory.

Familiarity preference

Recovery to the familiar stimulus, which assesses remote memory.

Statistical learning

The ability to detect the fundamental structure of complex flow of information by extracting frequently occurring patterns fairly automatically.

Imitation

Learning by copying the behaviors of others.

Mirror neurons

Specialized cells in motor areas of the cerebral cortex that may underlie early imitation.

Gross-motor development

Control over actions that help infants get around in the environment.

Fine-motor development

Control over smaller movements, such as reaching and grasping.

Dynamic systems theory of motor development

States that mastery of motor skills involves acquiring increasingly complex systems of action.

Prereaching

Newborns' poorly coordinated swipes toward objects.

Ulnar grasp

A clumsy motion in which fingers close against the palm.

Pincer grasp

A well-coordinated grasp using the thumb and index finger.

Perception

An active process in which we organize and interpret what we sense.

Perceptual narrowing effect

Perceptual sensitivity that becomes increasingly attuned with age to information most often encountered.

Size constancy

Perception of an object's size as the same, despite changes in the size of its retinal image.

Shape constancy

Perception of an object's shape as stable, despite changes in shape projected on the retina.

Intermodal perception

The perception of simultaneous input from more than one sensory system as an integrated whole.

Differentiation theory

States that infants actively search for invariant features of the environment in a constantly changing perceptual world.

Affordances

Action possibilities that a situation offers an organism with certain motor capabilities.

Sensorimotor Stage

Piaget's first stage, spanning the first two years of life, where infants and toddlers "think" with their sensorimotor equipment.

Schemes

Organized ways of making sense of experience.

Adaptation

Building schemes through direct interaction with the environment.

Assimilation

Using current schemes to interpret the external world.

Accommodation

Creating new schemes or adjusting old ones to better capture the environment.

Organization

Linking schemes with others to create a strongly interconnected cognitive system.

Circular reactions

Repeating chance behaviors that allow infants to adapt their schemes.

Object permanence

The understanding that objects continue to exist when out of sight.

Violation-of-expectation method

Assesses infants' knowledge of physical reality based on their attention to expected versus unexpected events.

Mental representation

Internal depictions of objects or events.

Displaced reference

The realization that words can cue mental images of things not physically present.

Video deficit effect

Poorer performance on a task after watching a video than after a live demonstration.

Sensory store

Sights and sounds are represented directly and stored momentarily.

Short-term memory store

Information is retained briefly so that we can actively "work" on it.

Long-term memory store

Our permanent knowledge base.

Working memory

The number of items a person can briefly hold in mind while engaging in some effort to monitor or manipulate those items.

Central executive

The conscious, reflective part of our mental system, which manages its activities, coordinates information, controls attention, and enables complex, flexible thinking.

Executive function

Cognitive operations and strategies that enable us to achieve our goals in cognitively challenging situations.

Recognition

Noticing when a stimulus is identical or similar to one previously experienced; the simplest form of memory.

Recall

Involves remembering something not present.

Infantile amnesia

Inability to recall events that happened to us before age 2½ to 3.

Autobiographical memory

The ability to recall many personally meaningful one-time events from both the recent and the distant past.

Vygotsky's sociocultural theory

Emphasizes that social and cultural contexts affect the structures of children's cognitive worlds.

Zone of proximal development

The range of tasks that a child cannot yet handle alone but can do with the help of more skilled partners.

Scaffolding

The process through which children learn in the zone of proximal development.

Developmental Quotients (DQs)

Scores from infant tests, used instead of IQs, because they do not tap the same dimensions of intelligence measured at older ages.

HOME (Home Observation for Measurement of the Environment)

A checklist for gathering information about the quality of children's home lives.

Nativist Theory (Chomsky)

Argues that language is etched into the structure of the human brain.

Language Acquisition Device (LAD)

An innate system containing a universal grammar common to all languages.

Broca's area

Appears to support language production.

Wernicke's area

Appears to support language comprehension.

Interactionist perspective

Emphasizes interactions between inner capacities and environmental influences in language development.

Social-interactionist view

An active child strives to communicate, which cues caregivers to provide appropriate language experiences.

Cooing

Vowel-like noises infants make (around 2 months).

Babbling

Repeated consonant-vowel combinations (around 6 months).

Joint attention

A child attends to the same object or event as the caregiver.

Preverbal gestures

Used by infants at the end of the first year to direct adults' attention.

Underextension

Applying words too narrowly.

Overextension

Applying words too broadly.

Telegraphic speech

Toddlers' use of high-content words while omitting smaller, less important ones.

Infant-directed speech (IDS)

Short sentences with high-pitched, exaggerated expression, clear pronunciation, distinct pauses, clear gestures, and repetition of new words.

Emotions

An integral part of children's dynamic systems of action that energize development.

Basic emotions

Happiness, interest, surprise, fear, anger, sadness, disgust; they are universal in humans and other primates and promote survival.

Social smile

An expression of happiness typically evoked by the parent's communication (6-10 weeks).

Stranger anxiety

Fear in response to unfamiliar adults.

Secure base

The familiar caregiver is used as a point from which to explore and to which to return for comfort.

Social referencing

Actively seeking emotional information from a trusted person in an uncertain situation (8-10 months).

Self-conscious emotions

Higher-order feelings involving injury to or enhancement of the sense of self (guilt, shame, embarrassment, envy, pride); appear in the middle of the second year.

Emotional self-regulation

Strategies used to adjust emotional states to a comfortable level of intensity to accomplish goals.

Temperament

Early-appearing, stable individual differences in reactivity and self-regulation.

Reactivity

Quickness and intensity of emotional arousal, attention, and motor activity.

Self-regulation

Strategies that modify reactivity.

Easy child

(40% of Thomas and Chess's sample).

Difficult child

(10% of Thomas and Chess's sample).

Slow-to-warm-up child

(15% of Thomas and Chess's sample).

Effortful control (Rothbart's Model)

A self-regulatory dimension that predicts favorable development and adjustment.

Inhibited (Shy) children

React negatively to and withdraw from novel stimuli.

Uninhibited (Sociable) children

Display positive emotion and approach novel stimuli.

Goodness-of-fit model

Involves creating child-rearing environments that recognize each child's temperament while simultaneously encouraging more adaptive functioning.