Chapter 4 First Half Flashcards
the fertilized egg; it enters a 2-week period of rapid cell division and develops into an embryo.
Zygote
a branch of psychology that studies physical, cognitive, and social change throughout the life span.
Developmental Psychology
the developing human organism from about 2 weeks after fertilization through the second month.
Embryo
the developing human organism from 9 weeks after conception to birth.
Fetus
agents, such as chemicals and viruses, that can reach the embryo or fetus during prenatal development and cause harm.
Teratogens
physical and cognitive abnormalities in children caused by a pregnant woman’s heavy drinking. In severe cases, symptoms include noticeable facial misproportions
Fetal Alcohol Syndrome
a baby’s tendency, when touched on the cheek, to turn toward the touch, open the mouth, and search for the nipple
Rooting Reflex
decreasing responsiveness with repeated stimulation. As infants gain familiarity with repeated exposure to a visual stimulus, their interest wanes and they look away sooner.
Habituation
biological growth processes that enable orderly changes in behavior, relatively uninfluenced by experience
Maturation
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.”
Jean Piaget
a concept or framework that organizes and interprets information.
Schemes
interpreting one’s new experience in terms of one’s existing schemas.
Assimilation
adapting one’s current understanding (schemas) to incorporate new information
Accommodation
: all the mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, remembering, and communicating.
Cognition
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.
Sensorimotor Stage
the awareness that things continue to exist even when not perceived.
Object Permanence
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.
Preoperational Stage
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.
Conservation
: in Piaget’s theory, the preoperational child’s difficulty taking another’s point of view.
Egocentrism
: people’s ideas about their own and others’ mental states—about their feelings, perceptions, and thoughts and the behavior these might predict.
Theory of Mind
a disorder that appears in childhood and is marked by deficient communication, social interaction, and understanding of others’ states of mind.
Autism
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.
Concrete Operational Stage
in Piaget’s theory, the stage of cognitive development (normally beginning about age 12) during which people begin to think logically about abstract concepts.
Formal Operational Stage
the fear of strangers that infants commonly display, beginning by about 8 months of age
Stranger Anxiety
an emotional tie with another person; shown in young children by their seeking closeness to the caregiver and showing distress on separation.
Attachment
