Chapter 5: What Do Infants Know and When and How Do They Know It?

Question 1

In research with infants, observing the amount of time infants spend looking at different visual stimuli to determine which one they prefer (look at more often); such as preferences indicate an ability to discriminate between stimuli

Answer 1

Visual Preference Paradigm

Question 2

Decrease in the response to a stimulus that has been presented repeatedly

Answer 2

Habituation

Question 3

The tendency to show renewed interest in a stimulus when some features of it have been changed

Answer 3

Dishabituation

Question 4

The process of adjusting the lens of the eye to focus on objects at different distances

Answer 4

Accommodation (of the lens)

Question 5

The ability to follow a moving object with one’s eyes

Answer 5

Visual Tracking

Question 6

The ability of both eyes to focus together on the same object, which is necessary for depth perception

Answer 6

Binocular Convergence

Question 7

The ability to see something sharply and clearly

Answer 7

Visual Acuity

Question 8

The ability to discriminate visual patterns denoting depth

Answer 8

Depth Perception

Question 9

Information about depth of objects associated with the movement of objects we are watching

Answer 9

Kinetic Cues

Question 10

The ability to integrate the images provided by each eye into a single, richer one

Answer 10

Stereoscopic (or binocular) vision

Question 11

Cues used to understand visual perspective; such as cues permit the perception of three dimensions from a two-dimensional target, as in a picture or a painting

Answer 11

Monocular (or pictorial) cues

Question 12

The tendency of young infants ( 1 month olds) to direct their attention primarily to the outside of a figure and to spend little time inspecting internal features

Answer 12

Externality effect

Question 13

Individual sounds that are used to make up words

Answer 13

Phonemes

Question 14

The ability to associate and interconnect information provided by different senses about a certain experience

Answer 14

Intermodel perception

Question 15

Based on habituation/dishabituation procedures, techniques in which increases in infants’ looking time at impossible events are interpreted as reflecting a violation of what they are expected to see

Answer 15

Violation-of-expectation

Question 16

Conditioning procedures used in memory research with infants, in which children’s behaviors, for example, kicking, control aspects of a visual display

Answer 16

Conjugate reinforcement procedure

Question 17

Imitation of a modeled act some time after viewing the behavior. Deferred imitation is a reflection of memory

Answer 17

Deferred Imitation

Question 18

The process of treating different objects as members of the same category

Answer 18

Categorization

Question 19

The central tendency, “best example,”of a cognitive category

Answer 19

Category prototype

Question 20

Expression used by some infant researchers to refer to the set of knowledge that young infants possess in certain domains, including objects, people and social relations, numbers and quantities and geometry

Answer 20

Core Knowledge

Question 21

The knowledge that an object remains the same despite changes in how it is viewed (i.e from a different perspective or distance

Answer 21

Object constancy

Question 22

The knowledge that objects have an existence in time and space independent of on’s own perception or action on those objects

Answer 22

Object Permanence

Question 23

The knowledge that objects are cohesive entities and move continuously through space

Answer 23

Object Continuity and Cohesion

Question 24

Objects permanence task, in which the infant has to retrieve a hidden object at one location (B), after having retrieved it several times previously from another one (A)

Answer 24

A-not-B task

Question 25

An object permanence task in which an object is hidden first in one container and then under another container out of the sight of the observer. Infants typically pass this task around 18 months

Answer 25

Invisible Displacement

Question 26

The ability of newborns to reproduce some specific behaviors, such as certain facial expressions, that they have seen in others

Answer 26

Neonatal Imitation

Question 27

The ability to determine quickly the number of items in a set without counting

Answer 27

Numerosity

Question 28

A basic understanding of more than and less than relationships

Answer 28

Ordinality

Question 29

Part of the hippocampus that continues to develop after birth and plays an important role in memory

Answer 29

Dentate Gyrus