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What are the three major issues in developmental psychology?
- nature vs. nurture
- continuity vs. stages
- stability vs change
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zygotes
- fertilized eggs
- enters a 2 week period of rapid cell division and develops into an embryo
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embryo
the developing human organism from about 2 weeks after fertilization through the second month
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fetus
the developing human organism from 9 weeks after conception to birth
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teratogens
agents, such as chemicals and viruses, that can reach the embryo or fetus during prenatal development and cause harm
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differentiation (in prenatal development)
during the zygote stage cells begin to specialize in structure and function
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fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS)
- physical and cognitive abnormalities in children caused by a pregnant woman's heavy drinking
- in severe cases, symptoms include noticable facial misproportions
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rooting reflex
a baby's tendency, when touched on the cheek, to turn toward the touch, open the mouth, and search for the nipple
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What have baby studies revealed about the newborn experience?
- babies prefer signts and sounds that facilitate social responsiveness
- they turn their head toward human voices
- they gaze longer at drawings of facelike images (vs. bull's-eye)
- they gaze longer at bull's-eyes that have eye-like features rather than a solid disc
- they prefer to look at objects 8-12 inches away (the distance from a nursing baby's eyes to it's mom's)
- within days, knows the smell of their mother
- withing 3 weeks, prefers the sound of their mother's voice (over a strange female)
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habituation
- a decrease in responding with repeated stimulation
- as an infant gains familiarity with repeated exposure to a visual stimulus, their interest wanes and they look away sooner
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What has research using habituation shown us about infant preferences and memory?
- infants (like adults) focus first on the face, not the body
- infants can discriminate colors, shapes, sounds
- infants can understand some basic concepts of numbers and physics
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maturation
biological growth processes that enable orderly changes in behavior, relatively uninfluenced by experience
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Describe the developmental changes in a child's brain.
- the developing brain cortex overproduces neurons which are pruned after puberty
- you are born with most of the brain cells you will ever have
- from age 3-6 the brain's neural network is growing mostly in the frontal lobes (rational planning) - this continues through adolescence and beyond
- the last area to develop are the association areas (thinking, memory, language)
- fiber pathways supporting language and agility develop into puberty
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What is the relationship between maturation (genetically determined) and experience in the development of a child?
- maturation sets the basic course for development but environment adjusts this course
- For example: severe deprivation or abuse can retard development and experience with parents who talk and read to a child will help strengthen neural connections.
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What are the four events in the motor development sequence from birth to toddlerhood?
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What are the effects on maturation and experience in relation to the sequence of motor developments from birth to toddlerhood?
- given these skills involve the maturation of the nervous system, environment does nothing to change the aquisition of these skills
- the rapid development of the cerebellum around age 1 accounts for the development of walking at about this age
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What is the average age for people's earliest conscious memory?
3.5 years old
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Why do we have few memories of experiences in our lives from birth to about 3?
- infants pre-verbal memories do not translate into their later language
- we organize our memories differently after age 3 or 4
- we do have unconscious memories of some things, but cannot consciouly recall them
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Jean Piaget
- developmental psychologist
- initially worked to develop questions for children's intelligence tests
- studied cognitive development
- developed/described the four main stages of cognitive development
- believed the driving force bethond our intellectual progression is our unceasing struggle to make sense of our experiences
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scale errors
- 18 to 30 month old children may fail to take into account the size of an object when trying to perform actions with it
- for example, a child who sits in a doll house size chair or tries to get into a toy car
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schemas
a concept or framework that organizes and interprets information
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impossible objects
an object for which there is no schema, therefore we can't recall it exactly (like the devil's tuning fork)
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