Infancy and Toddlerhood (Ch 5-7) Flashcards
1
Q
Suzie has been acting angrily for the past few months . What part of the brain could have been damaged to result in this behavior?
A
amygdala
2
Q
Lucas can’t seem to remember much lately. Which part of the brain could have been damaged to result in this?
A
hippocampus
3
Q
What are the cells that make up the nervous system of the body called?
A
neurons
4
Q
What is plasticity?
A
the ability of an immature brain to change in form and function
5
Q
At what point of a person’s life would plasticity most likely occur?
A
infancy
6
Q
What is the development that occurs when we encounter common human experiences such as seeing light?
A
experience-expectant brain development
7
Q
What is the brain development that occurs in an individual in response to specific learning experiences?
A
experience-dependent brain development
8
Q
What is myelination?
A
the process of laying down a fatty sheath of myelin on the neurons
9
Q
What are mirror neurons?
A
Neurons that fire both when an individual acts and when the individual observes the same action performed by another
10
Q
What is cerebral palsy?
A
condition that appears early development and primarily involves issues with body movement and muscle coordination
11
Q
What are the roles of neurons and synapses?
A
to send signals throughout the body to the brain or the spinal cord
12
Q
What happens in the brain in the process of pruning?
A
many neural connections that aren’t being used will be removed from the brain to promote more efficiency and strengthen more connections
13
Q
What roles does myelination play in brain development?
A
myelination improves the speed in which information is delivered and processed
14
Q
What differences have been found between the brain of a child with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and a child who does not have ASD?
A
Children with ASD have an enlargement of the amygdala, which makes it more difficult for that person to have social relationships. Along with a larger brain volume for children with ASD, resulting in problems with social interaction or repetitive behaviors.
15
Q
Why do you think an infant’s brain makes such a huge number of synaptic connections only to then prune many away?
A
This is to enhance and strengthen the connections of the synaptic connections that are used more.
16
Q
What is sensation?
A
the information from the environment that is picked up by our sense organs
17
Q
What is perception?
A
the process of interpreting and attaching meaning to sensory information
18
Q
What is visual acuity?
A
the ability to see things in sharp detail
19
Q
Do newborns or young infants have good visual acuity?
A
No, when children are first born, they are not able to see very far.
20
Q
How can early hearing loss be detrimental to hearing development of language?
A
it can lead to difficulties with psychosocial development and later academic achievement
21
Q
When is the most critical time to intervene with early hearing loss?
A
Before the age of 6 months
22
Q
When are infants able to recognize their own name?
A
6 months
23
Q
What is cross-modal transfer of perception?
A
Perception with one sense, such as vision, enables recognition of that object with another sense, such as touch
24
Q
What are gross motor skills?
A
Skills that involve large muscle groups of the body (ex: the legs and arms) – boys usually develop in this area quicker than girls
25
What are fine motor skills?
Skills that involve small movements, mostly of the hands and fingers, but also of the lips and tongue (ex: speaking)
26
What is Babinski reflex?
when the sole of the newborn's foot is stroked from the toes to the heel -- baby's toes fan out
27
What is proximodistal?
the development that proceeds from the central axis of the body toward the extremities
28
What is cephalocaudal direction of motion development?
When babies gain control of their bodies from the head down
29
How many steps do infants typically make in a day when they first begin to walk?
9,000 steps
30
What is colostrum?
Thick, yellowish substance when first breastfeeding
31
What is protein-energy malnutrition?
A term used to describe a group of related disorders that include marasmus and kwashiorkor
32
What is marasmus?
A disorder more likely to occur in babies and young children, who eat reasonable amount of calories but inadequate protein
33
What is kwashiorkor?
A disorder most likely to occur among older children, who suffer from severe protein deficiency which leads to the body retaining too much fluid -- becomes a swollen appearance and inability to grow or gain weight
34
How much do newborns typically sleep in a day?
80% of their day
35
How much do toddlers typically sleep in a night?
Half of their day
36
How much do infants at 6 months typically sleep in a day?
12 hours or more
37
What is infant mortality?
Infant death within the first year of life
38
What are the symptoms of shaken baby syndrome?
convulsions (seizures), decreased alertness, extreme irritability in behaviors, sleepiness, unconsciousness, loss of vision, no breathing, pale or bluish skin, poor feeding/lack of appetite, vomiting
39
What is cortisol?
A hormone produced as part of the stress response that prepares the body to deal with threat and also shuts down nonessential functions; prepares body to deal with threats in the environment by increasing blood pressure and heart rate
40
If a young child drops an object from her high chair over and over again, she is probably just asserting herself and testing her parents' patience. True or false?
False
41
Infants appear to have an innate understanding of how gravity works. True or false?
True
42
When an adult sticks her tongue out at a newborn infant, the infant will likely imitate her. True or false?
False
43
Few people have clear memories of what happened in their lives before the age of 3. True or false?
True
44
Being attracted to new things as an infant is associated with intelligence in later childhood. True or false?
True
45
Children must develop language by a certain age or they will never be able to speak. True or false?
False
46
Infants are born with a preference for listening to their native language. True or false?
True
47
Teaching babies to use sign language will delay development of spoken language. True or false?
False
48
It is perfectly fine to use baby talk with infants. True or false?
True
49
Babies who watch videos designed to improve cognitive development have larger vocabularies than babies who don't watch these videos. True or false?
False
50
What is schema?
A cognitive framework that places concepts, objects, or experiences into categories or groups of associations (ex: dog)
51
What is disequilibrium?
A state of confusion in which your mental schemas do not fit your experiences (ex: child who is served unfamiliar food may not recognize that it is food)
52
What is the sensorimotor stage?
The first stage in which infants learn through their senses and their actions on their environment
53
What are the general trends of the sensorimotor stage?
Development of reflexes, development of object permanence, and development from motor action to mental representation
54
What is the circular reaction?
An infant's repetition of a reflexive action that results in a pleasurable experience (ex: sucking it's thumb)
55
What is motor schema?
Infants' understanding of the world through their action on it (ex: seeing if an object is suckable by putting it in it's mouth)
56
What is object permanence?
The understanding that objects continue to exist when no one is interacting with them
57
What is the A-not-B error?
Results from a still unclear understanding of an object as separate from their experience of that object, they continue to search there even when the object was moved
58
What is assimilation?
take the new experiences that we have into an existing schema
59
What is accomodation?
Changing the way we think about something to understand the new information (ex: correcting a child when they think a cat is a dog)
60
What is the theory of core knowledge?
The theory that basic areas of knowledge are innate and build into the human brain
61
What is a violation of expectation?
Research based on the finding that babies look longer at unexpected or surprising events
62
What is selective attention?
Tuning in to certain things while tuning out others -- develops later in the first year of birth
63
What is sustained or focused attention?
Maintaining focus over time -- can be seen in infants when looking at the amount of time the infant plays with a toy
64
What is habituation?
Reduction in the response to a stimulus that is repeated (ex: walk in a room that has loud AC, but you won't hear it after a while)
65
What is deferred imitation?
the ability to remember something and re-enact it at a later time
66
What is infantile amnesia?
Adults' inability to remember experiences that happened to them before they were about 3 years of age
67
What is executive function?
the ability of the brain to coordinate attention and memory and control behavioral responses for the purpose of attaining a certain goal
68
What is inhibitory control?
the ability to stop more automatic cognitive responses to do what is needed to carry out a task correctly
69
What is working memory?
the memory system that stores information for a brief period to allow the mind to process it to use in mental tasks and to move into long-term storage
70
What is cognitive flexibility?
the ability to switch focus as needed to complete a task -- limited in infants and toddlers
71
What is social cognition?
the ways we use cognitive processes to understand our social world -- infants 8-12 months appear to understand people's intentions or desires rather than just their actions
72
What are the four basic aspects of cognition?
Attention, memory, executive function, and social cognition
73
What is intellectual disability?
A type of intellectual impairment that begins early in life and includes deficits in intellectual, social, and adaptive functioning
74
What is phonology?
the study of the sounds of a language
75
What is syntax?
the grammar of a language (ex: play becomes played in past tense)
76
What is semantics?
the study of the meanings of words
77
What is pragmatics?
the rules that guide the way we use language in social situations
78
What is nativism?
a theory that human brains are innately wired to learn language and that hearing spoken language triggers the activation of a universal grammar
79
what is a language acquisition device?
an innate capacity in the human brain for learning language
80
What is universal grammar?
a hypothetical set of grammatical rules and constraints, thought to underlie all languages and to be hardwired in the human brain
81
What is overregularization?
a type of grammatical error in which children apply a general language rule to words that don't follow the rule or pattern (ex: foot can't be foots in plural)
82
What is interactionism?
a theory of language development that proposes the child's biological readiness to learn language interacts with the child's experiences with language in the environment to bring about language development
83
What is recast?
repeating what children say but in a more advanced grammar to facilitate language learning
84
What is cognitive processing theory?
the theory that learning language is a process of data crunch, in which the actual process of learning words and their meanings relies on the computational ability of the human brain
85
What is transitional probability?
the likelihood that one particular sound will follow another one to form a word
86
What is the Broca's area?
the part of the brain active in the physical production of speech -- movement of tongue and lips
87
What is the Wernicke's area?
the part of the brain active in processing the meaning in speech
88
What is receptive language?
the ability to understand words and sentences
89
What is expressive language?
the written or spoken language we use to convey our thoughts, emotions, or needs
90
When do babies start to coo?
between 2 to 4 months
91
When do babies begin to babble?
between 6 to 8 months
92
What is joint attention?
a process in which an individual looks at the same object that someone else is looking at, but also looks at the person to make sure that they are both involved with the same thing
93
What is child-directed speech?
speech tailored to fit the sensory and cognitive capabilities of infants and children so it holds their attention, includes speaking in a higher pitch with exaggerated intonation and a singsong rhythm and using a simplified vocabulary -- also known as baby-talk
94
What are holophrases?
individual words used by infants that communicate the meaning of a whole phrase
95
What are constraints?
assumptions language learners make that limit the alternative meanings they attribute to new words
96
What is whole object bias?
an assumption made by language learners that a word describes an entire object rather than just some portion of it (ex: child thinks word giraffe means it is the whole animal)
97
What is mutual exclusivity constraint?
an assumption made by language learners that there is one and only one name for an object (ex: child hears novel word, doesn't know what it is, assumes that it describes this object they don't know)
98
What is taxonomic constraint?
an assumption language learners make that two objects that have features in common can have a name in common, but that each object also can have its own individual name
99
What is syntactic bootstrapping?
the use of syntax to learn the meaning of new words
100
What is semantic bootstrapping?
the use of word meanings to understand grammatical categories
101
What is fast mapping?
a process by which children apply constraints and their knowledge of grammar to learn new words very quickly, often after a single exposure
102
How does poverty affect young infants in development?
limitations that come with the lack of resources and the stresses associated with poverty can negatively affect the potential for cognitive development of even young infants
103
What improves vocabulary and understanding to children?
Parents reading to their children
104
How do infants learn?
young infants learn through classical conditioning and operant conditioning and through imitation
105
What is emotion?
the body's physiological reaction to a situation, the cognitive interpretation of the situation, communication of that reaction to another person, and actions based on that reaction
106
What are basic emotions?
an automatic and unlearned set of emotions that arise early in development and have a biological basis (ex: happiness, sadness, fear, anger, interest, and disgust)
107
What are emotional display rules?
culturally determined norms for when, how, and to whom emotions should, or should not, be shown (ex: USA children are encouraged to express their inner feelings, Eastern cultures low-arousal emotions such as being calm and relaxed are more acceptable)
108
What are emotion schemas?
all the associations and interpretation that an individual connects to a certain emotion
109
What is social referencing?
using the reaction of others to determine how to react in ambiguous situations
110
What is empathy?
the experience of feeling with another person -- requires awareness that the emotion belongs to the other person and not to oneself
111
What is temperament?
the general emotional style an individual displays in responding to experiences in the world
112
What is goodness of fit?
how well a child's temperament characteristics match the demands of the child's environment
113
What is emotion coaching?
a parental style that teaches children how to understand their emotions and deal with them
114
What is emotion dismissing?
a parental style that teaches children to ignore their feelings
115
What is visual perspective-taking?
the understand that other people can see an object from a point of view that is different from one's own
116
autonomy versus shame and doubt
Erikson's second stage of development in which toddlers assert their autonomy or separation of self from others -- autonomy is independence
117
What is attachment?
an emotional bond to a particular person
118
What is trust versus mistrust?
Erikson's first stage of development in which infants develop their first relationships with caregivers to test whether the world can be trusted or not
119
What is preattachment?
stage of attachment from birth to 6 weeks, infant sensory preferences bring infants into close connection with parents
120
What is attachment in the making?
6 weeks to 8 months infants develop stranger anxiety, differentiating those they know from those they don't
121
What is clear-cut attachment?
6 months to 1-2 years when infant develops separation anxiety when a person they are attached to leaves them
122
What is goal-corrected partnership?
18 months on, toddlers create reciprocal relationships with their parents
123
What is a secure base for exploration?
the use of a parent to provide the security that infants can rely on as they explore the environment
124
What is internal working model?
mental representations of particular attachment relationships a child has experience that shape expectation for future relationships
125
What is the strange situation?
Mary Ainsworth's experimental procedure designed to asses security of attachment in infants -- described the four types of attachment (secure, anxious avoidant, anxious ambivalent/resistant, and disorganized/disorientated p 230)
126
What is reactive attachment disorder?
a disorder marked by an inability to form attachments to caregivers
127
What is disinhibited social engagement disorder?
an attachment disorder in which children approach strangers indiscriminately, not differentiating between attachment figures and other people
128
What is a nuclear family?
a family consisting of married couple and their biological and adopted children
129
What is an extended family?
a family structure that includes nuclear family members and other relatives, such as grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins
130
What are open adoptions?
adoptions in which the children and their biological and adoptive families have access to each other
131
What is foster care?
the temporary placement of children in a family that is not their own
132
How do infants and toddlers develop a sense of self?
within 2 years, develop the ability to recognize themselves in a mirror and use proper pronouns for themselves as well as becoming more possessive of their toys
