Chapter 4 - Developmental Psychology Flashcards
Developmental Psychology
a branch of psychology that studies physical, cognitive, and social change throughout the life span.
Zygote
The fertilized egg; it enters a 2-week period of rapid cell division and develops into an embryo.
Embryo
The developing human organism from about 2 weeks after fertilization through the second month.
Fetus
The developing human organism from 9 weeks after conception to birth.
Teratogens
Agents, such as chemicals and viruses, that can reach the embryo or fetus during prenatal development and cause harm.
Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS)
Physical and cognitive abnormalities in children caused by a pregnant woman’s heavy drinking. In severe cases, symptoms include noticeable facial misproportions.
Rooting Reflex
A baby’s tendency, when touched on the cheek to turn toward the touch, open the mouth, and search for the nipple.
Habituation
Decreasing responsiveness with repeated stimulation. As infants gain familiarity with repeated exposure to a visual stimulus, their interest wanes and they look away sooner.
Maturation
Biological growth processes that enable orderly changes in behavior, relatively uninfluenced by experience.
Jean Piaget
Revolutionized our understanding of children’s minds. Until Piaget, most people–forgetting their own preschool days–assumed children ‘simply knew less, not differently, than adults.’ Thanks partly to his work, we now understand that ‘children reason in wildly illogical ways about problems whose solutions are self-evident to adults’.
Schema
A concept or framework that organizes and interprets information.
Assimilation
Interpreting one’s new experience in terms of one’s existing schemas.
Accommodation
Adapting one’s current understanding (schemas) to incorporate new information.
Cognition
All the mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, remembering, and communicating.
Sensorimotor Stage
In Piaget’s theory, the stage (from birth to about 2 years of age) during which infants know the world mostly in terms of their sensory impressions and motor activities.
Object Permanence
The awareness that things continue to exist even when not perceived.
Preoperational Stage
In Piaget’s theory, the stage (from about 2 to 6 or 7 years of age) during which a child learns to use language but does not yet comprehend the mental operations of concrete logic.
Conservation
The principle (which Piaget believed to be a part of concrete operational reasoning) that properties such as mass, volume, and number remain the same despite changes in the forms of objects.
Egocentrism
in Piaget’s theory, the preoperational child’s difficulty taking another’s point of view.
Theory of Mind
People’s ideas about their own and others’ mental states–about their feelings, perceptions, and thoughts and the behavior these might predict.
Autism
A disorder that appears in childhood and is marked by deficient communication, social interaction, and understanding of others’ states of mind.
Concrete Operational Stage
In Piaget’s theory, the stage of cognitive development (from about 6 or 7 to 11 years of age) during which children gain the mental operations that enable them to think logically about concrete events.
Formal Operational Stage
In Piaget’s theory, the stage of cognitive development (normally beginning at age 12) during which people begin to think logically about abstract concepts.
Stranger Anxiety
The fear of strangers that infants commonly display, beginning by about 8 months of age.
