Chapter 5 Flashcards
A point on a ranking scale of 0 to 100. The 50th percentile is the midpoint; half the people in the population being studied rank higher and half rank lower.
Percentile
A biological mechanism that protects the brain when malnutrition affects body growth. That brain is the last part of the body to be damaged by malnutrition.
Head-Sparing
Rapid eye movement sleep, a stage of sleep characterized by flickering eyes behind closed lids, dreaming, and rapid brain waves.
REM Sleep
A custom in which parents and their children (usually infants) sleep together in the same room.
Co-Sleeping
The billions of nerve cells in the central nervous system, especially the brains.
Neurons
The outer layers of the brain in humans and other mammals.
Cortex
The area of cortex at the front of the brain that specializes in anticipation, planning, and impulse control.
Prefrontal Cortex
A fiber that extends from a neuron and transmits electrochemical impulses from that neuron to the dendrites of other neurons.
Axon
A fiber that extends from a neuron and receives electrochemical impulses transmitted from other neurons via their axons.
Dendrite
The intersection between the axon of one neuron and the dendrites of other neurons.
Synapse
The great but temporary increase in the number of dendrites that develop in an infant’s brain during the first two years of life.
Transient Exuberance
When applied to brain development, the process by which unused connections in the brain atrophy and die.
Pruning
Brain functions that require certain basic common experiences (which an infant can be expected to have) in order to develop normally.
Experience-Expectant Brain Functions
Brain functions that depend on particular, variable experiences and that therefore may or may not develop in a particular infant.
Experience-Dependent Brain Functions
A life-threatening injury that occurs when an infant is forcefully shaken back and forth, a motion that ruptures blood vessels in the brain and breaks neural connections.
Shaken Baby Syndrome
The inborn drive to remedy a developmental deficit; literally, to return to sitting or standing upright, after being tipped over.
Self-Righting
The response of a sensory system (eyes, ears, skin, tongue, nose) when it detects a stimulus.
Sensation
The mental processing of sensory information when the brain interprets a sensation.
Perception
The ability to focus the two eyes in a coordinated manner in order to see one image. This ability is absent at birth.
Binocular Vision
The learned abilities to move some part of the body, in actions ranging from a large leap to a flicker of the eyelid.
Motor Skills
Physical abilities involving large body movements, such as walking an jumping.
Gross Motor Skills (Big)
Physical abilities involving small body movements, especially of the hands and fingers, such as drawing and picking up a coin.
Fine Motor Skills (Small)
The process of protecting a person against a disease, via antibodies.
Immunization
A condition in which a person does not consume sufficient food of any kind. This deprivation can result in several illnesses, severe weight loss, and even death.
Protein-Calorie Malnutrition
The failure of children to grow to a normal height for their age due to severe and chronic malnutrition.
Stunting
The tendency for children to be severely underweight for their age as a result of malnutrition.
Wasting
A disease of severe protein-calorie malnutrition during early infancy, in which growth stops, body tissues waste away, and the infant eventually dies.
Marasmus
A disease of chronic malnutrition during childhood, in which a protein deficiency makes the child more vulnerable to other diseases, such as measles, diarrhea, and influenza.
Kwashiorkor
