Psychology Chapter 4
Terms
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- developmental psychology
- a branch of psychology that studies physical, cognitive, and social change throughout the life span.
- zygote
- the fertilized egg; it enters a 2-week period of rapid cell division and develops into an embryo.
- embryo
- the developing human organism from about 2 weeks after fertilisation through the second month.
- fetus
- the developing human organism from 9 weeks after conception to birth.
- teratogens
- agents, such as chemicals and viruses, that can reach the embryo or fetus during prenatal development and cause harm.
- fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS)
- physical and cognitive abnormalitites in children caused by a pregnant woman's heavy drinking. In severe cases, symptoms include noticeable facial misproportions.
- rooting reflex
- a baby's tendency, when touched on the cheek, to open the mouth and search for the nipple.
- habituation
- decreasing responsiveness with repeated stimulation. As infants gain familiarity with repeted exposure to a visual stimulus, their interest wanes and they look away sooner.
- maturatoin
- biological growth processes that enable orderly changes in behavior, relatively uninfluenced by experience.
- schema
- a concept or framework that organizes and interprets information.
- assimilation
- interpreting one's new experience in terms of one's existing schemas.
- accomodation
- adapting one's current understandings (schemas) to incorporate new information.
- cognition
- all the mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, remembering, and communicating.
- object prmanence
- the awareness that things continue to exist even when not perceived
- sensorimotor stage
- in piaget's theory, the stage (from birth to about 2 years of age) during which infants know the world mostly in terms of their sensory impressiions and motor activities.
- preoperational stage
- in piaget's theory, the stage (from about 2 to 6 or 7 years of age) during which a child learns to use language but does not yet compreend the mental operations of concrete logic.
- conservation
- the principle (which Piaget believed to be a part of concrete operational reasoning) that properties such as mass, volume, and number remain the same despite changes in the forms of objects.
- egocentrism
- in Piaget's theory, the inability of the preoperational child to take another's point of view.
- theory of mind
- people's ideas about their own and others' mental states- about their feelings, perceptions, and thoughts and the behavior these might predict.
- autism
- a disorder that appears in childhood and is marked by deficient communication, social interaction, and understanding of others' states of mind.
- concrete operational stage
- in Piaget's theory, the stage of cognitive development (from about 6 or 7 to 11 years of age) during which children gain the mental operations that enable them to think logically about concrete events.
- formal operational stage
- in Piaget's theory, the stage of cognitive development (normally beginning about age 12) during which people begin to think logically about abstract concepts.