Infancy

Question 1

reflex

Answer 1

inborn, automatic response to a particular form of stimulation

Question 2

states of arousal

Answer 2

degrees of sleep and wakefulness

Question 3

rapid-eye movement

Answer 3

similar to that of waking state–eyes dart beneath the lids, heart rate, bp and breathing are uneven, slight body movements occur

Question 4

non-rapid eye movement

Answer 4

body is almost motionless and heart rate, breathing and wave activity are slow and even

Question 5

Neonatal Behavioral Assessment Scale

Answer 5

evaluates the baby’s reflexes, muscle tone, state changes, responsiveness to physical and social stimuli

Question 6

classical conditioning

Answer 6

form of learning where a neutral stimulus is paired with a stimulus that leads to a reflexive response; baby make’s connection and new stimulus now produces the behavior by itself

Question 7

operant conditioning

Answer 7

infants act or operate on the environment and stimuli that follow their behavior change the probability that the behavior will occur again

Question 8

habituation

Answer 8

refers to gradual reduction in the strength of response due to repetitive stimulation

Question 9

recovery

Answer 9

new stimulus causes the habituated response to return to a high level

Question 10

imitation

Answer 10

copying the behavior of another person

Question 11

mirror neurons

Answer 11

specialized cells that fire identically when one sees / hears an action and when it carries out that action on its own

Question 12

dynamic systems theory of motor development

Answer 12

mastery of motor skills involves acquiring increasingly complex systems of actions; separate abilities blend together to produce more effective ways of exploring and controlling the environment

Question 13

prereaching

Answer 13

newborns make poorly coordinated swipes

Question 14

ulnar grasp

Answer 14

clumsy motion in which the baby’s fingers close against the palm

Question 15

pincer grasp

Answer 15

infants use the thumb and index finger in a well-coordinated pincer grasp

Question 16

statistical learning capacity

Answer 16

analyzing speech streams for patterns –> stock of speech structures

Question 17

visual acuity

Answer 17

fineness of discrimination

Question 18

visual cliff

Answer 18

used in earliest studies of depth perception

Question 19

contrast sensitivity

Answer 19

explains early pattern preferences; contrast refers to the difference in the amount of light between adjacent regions in a pattern; babies are sensitive to the contrast in two or more patterns

Question 20

size constancy

Answer 20

perception of an objects size as the same, despite changes in the size of its retinal image

Question 21

shape constancy

Answer 21

perception of an object’s shape as stable, despite changes in the shape projected on the retina

Question 22

intermodal perception

Answer 22

we make sense of these streams of light, sound, tactile, odor and taste infomraiton, perceiving them as integrated wholes

Question 23

amodal sensory properties

Answer 23

information that is not specific to a single modality but that overlaps two or more sensory systems

Question 24

differentiation theory

Answer 24

infants actively search for invariant features of the environment (those that remain stable)

Question 25

affordances

Answer 25

perception is guided by action possibilities a situation offers an organism with motor capabilities