Early Childhood Flashcards
Corpus Callosum
the thick bundle of nerve fibers that connects the left and right hemispheres of the brain
Plasticity
the tendency of new parts of the brain to take up the functions of injured parts
Gross Motor Skills
skills employing the large muscles used in locomotion
Fine Motor Skills
skills employing the large muscles used in manipulation, such as those in the fingers
Nightmares
dreams of disturbing and vivid content
Sleep Terrors
frightening dreamlike experiences that occur during the deepest stage of non-REM sleep, shortly after the child has gone to sleep
Somnambulism
sleepwalking
Enuresis
failure to control the bladder (urination) once the normal age for control has been reached
Bed-Wetting
failure to control the bladder during the night
Encopresis
failure to control the bowels once the normal age for bowel control has been reached, also called soiling
Preoperational Stage
Piaget’s second stage of development, characterized by inflexible and irreversible mental manipulation of symbols
Symbolic Play
play in which children make believe that objects and toys are other than what they are, also called pretend play
Egocentrism
putting oneself at the center of things such that one is unable to perceive the world from another person’s point of view
Precausal
a type of thought in which natural cause-and-effect relationships are attributed to will and other preoperational concepts
Transductive Reasoning
faulty reasoning that links one specific isolated event to another specific isolated event
Animism
the attribution of life and intentionality to inanimate objects
Conservation
in cognitive psychology, the principle that properties of substances such as weight and mass remain the same (are conserved) when superficial characteristics such as their shapes or arrangement are changed
Theory of Mind
the understanding that people are mental beings who have their own mental states, including thoughts, wishes, feelings that differ from our own
Appearance-Reality Distinction
the difference between real events on the one hand and mental events, fantasies and misleading appearances on the other hand
Scripts
abstract, generalized accounts of familiar repeated events
Autobiographical Memory
the memory of specific episodes or events
Rehearsal
a strategy that uses repetition to remember information
Fast-Mapping
a process of quickly determining a word’s meaning, which facilitates children’s vocabulary development
Overregularization
the application of regular grammatical rules for forming inflections to irregular verbs and nouns