Infant and Child Development Key Terms

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Across
  1. 2. all forms of knowing and awareness, such as perceiving, conceiving, remembering, reasoning, judging, imagining, and problem solving. Along with affect and conation, it is one of the three traditionally identified components of mind.
  2. 3. an involuntary grasping by an individual of anything that touches the palm. This reflex is typical of infants, but in older individuals, it may be a sign of frontal lobe damage or disease.
  3. 5. the awareness that physical quantities do not change in amount when they are altered in appearance, such as when water is poured from a wide, short beaker into a thin, tall one. According to Piagetian theory, children become capable of this mental operation in the concrete operational stage. See also reversibility.
  4. 6. the speech of children roughly between the ages of 18 and 30 months. This is usually in the form of two-word expressions up to the age of about 24 months (see two-word stage) and thereafter is characterized by short but multiword expressions (e.g., dog eat bone). Also called telegraphic stage
  5. 10. an early stage in life when an organism is especially open to specific learning, emotional, or socializing experiences that occur as part of normal development and will not recur at a later stage. For example, the first 3 days of life are thought to constitute a critical period for imprinting in ducks, and there may be a critical period for language acquisition in human infants. See also sensitive period.in vision, the period of time after birth, varying from weeks (in cats) to months (in humans), in which full, binocular visual stimulation is necessary for the structural and functional maturation of the visual system. See also monocular rearing.
  6. 11. a simple yet profound and highly effective learning process that occurs during a critical period in the life of some animals. It was first described in 1873 by British naturalist Douglas A. Spalding (1840–1877) when he observed that newly hatched chicks tended to follow the first moving object, human or animal, that caught their attention. The term itself was introduced by Konrad Lorenz in 1937. Some investigators believe that such processes are instinctual; others regard them as a form of preparedness.
  7. 13. the biological processes involved in an organism’s becoming functional or fully developed.
  8. 14. the emotional bond between a human infant or a young nonhuman animal and its parent figure or caregiver; it is developed as a step in establishing a feeling of security and demonstrated by calmness while in the parent’s or caregiver’s presence. Attachment also denotes the tendency to form such bonds with certain other individuals in infancy as well as the tendency in adulthood to seek emotionally supportive social relationships.
  9. 15. a problematic condition arising from the assumption that each person’s experience is essentially private. The problem is commonly expressed in terms of one or more of the following propositions: (a) It is difficult to explain how any person could know anything about another person’s experience; (b) it is likewise difficult to understand how general knowledge of the external world is possible apart from one’s individual experience; and (c) given that experience is essentially private, it is difficult to understand how genuine communication between two people might be possible, since both the content and symbols of any communication will be similarly private. The egocentric predicament is often said to be an unavoidable consequence of the Cartesian self.
Down
  1. 1. knowledge of the continued existence of objects even when they are not directly perceived. According to Jean Piaget, object permanence develops gradually in infants during the sensorimotor stage of cognitive development. Milestones that indicate the acquisition of object permanence include reaching for and retrieving a covered object (about 8 months), retrieving an object at Location B even though it was previously hidden several times at Location A (the A-not-B task; about 12 months), and removing a series of covers to retrieve an object, even though the infant only witnessed the object being hidden under the outermost cover (invisible displacement; about 18 months). Recent research using nonreaching tasks suggests that infants display some knowledge of object permanence at an earlier age than that suggested by Piaget.
  2. 4. prior to birth: pertaining to that which exists or occurs between conception and birth.
  3. 7. adjustment or modification. For example, regarding individuals with disabilities, it refers to reasonable accommodations made to meet their needs. In the context of bargaining and interpersonal negotiations, it refers to modification of the various parties’ demands or actions in order to achieve agreement or a mutually beneficial outcome.
  4. 8. an automatic, unlearned response of a newborn to a gentle stimulus (e.g., the touch of a finger) applied to the corner of the mouth or to the cheek, in which the infant turns their head and makes sucking motions.
  5. 9. the process of absorbing, incorporating, or making similar. In making judgments, for example, it refers to finding similarities between the target being judged and features of the context in which it is judged. Thus, meeting a person at an enjoyable party could lead to a more positive evaluation of that person than would have been the case otherwise. The evaluation of the person has been assimilated toward the positive social context.
  6. 12. cognition based on use of symbols, including, but not limited to, language and images.