Agents, such as chemicals and viruses, that can reach the embryo or fetus during prenatal development and cause harm.
Maturation
Biological growth processes that enable orderly changes in behavior, relatively uninfluenced by experience. Biological growth processes that enable orderly changes in behavior, relatively uninfluenced by experience.
The process of growth and development.
Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS)
Physical and cognitive abnormalities in children caused by pregnant woman's heavy drinking.
Assimilation
Interpreting our new experiences in terms of our existing schemas.
Accommodation
Adapting our current understandings (schemas) to incorporate new information.
Sensorimotor Stage
Piaget's Theory, the stage (birth to 2 years) during which infants know the world mostly in terms of their sensory impressions and motor activities.
Object Permanence
The awareness that things continue to exist even when not perceived.
Preoperational Stage
Piaget's Theory, the stage (2 to 6/7) during which a child learns to use language but does not yet comprehend the mental operations of concrete logic.
Egocentrism
Piaget's Theory, the preoperational child's difficulty taking another's point of view.
Conservation
The principle that properties such as mass, volume, and number remain the same despite changes in the form of the objects.
Piaget believed this to be part of the concrete operational reasoning.
Concrete Operational Stage
Piaget's Theory, the stage of cognitive development (6/7 to 11) during which children gain the mental operations that enable them to think logically about concrete events.
Formal Operational Stage
Piaget's Theory, the stage of cognitive development (12 years) during which people begin to think logically about abstract concepts.
Jean Piaget
A swiss psychologist who pioneered the study of children's intellectual development.
Theory of Cognitive Development
Sensorimotor
Preoperational
Concrete Operational
Formal Operational
Zone of Proximal Development
The gap between what a learner can do independently, and what they can do with help.
Lev Vygotsky
Konrad Lorenz
Recognized as one of the founding father of the field of ethology, His research was of the principle of imprinting.
Mary Ainsworth
A Developmental psychologist who came up with the Strange Situation experiment to observe how children react when their caregiver re-enters the room after having left prior.
Harry Harlow
An American psychologist who is best known for his maternal separation, dependency needs, and social isolation with monkeys.
Diana Baumrind
Psychologist who researched 3 types of parenting styles.
Authoritarian
Permissive
Authoritative
Gender Role
A set of expected behaviors for males or for females.
Gender Identity
Our sense of being male or female
Carol Gilligan
A psychologist who criticized Kohlberg's theory for being male-centric.
Lawrence Kohlberg
The most influential psychologist in the field of moral development, particularly in children.
Erik Erikson
A theorist who believed that each stage of life had it's own task to overcome.
Cross-Sectional Study
A study in which people of different ages are compared with one another.
Longitudinal Study
Research in which the same people are restudied and retested over a long period.
Secure Attachment
A type of emotional bond in which a child feels safe, protected, and comfortable with a caregiver.
Avoidant (insecure) Attachment
An insecure attachment style where individuals tend to avoid closeness or emotional connections with others.
Anxious-Ambivalent Attachment
Children tend to distrust caregivers, and this insecurity often means that their environment is explored with trepidation rather than excitement.
Authoritarian Parenting
Parents impose rules and expect obedience.
"because I said so."
Permissive Parenting
Parents submit to their children's desires. They make few demands and use little punishment.
Authoritative Parenting
Parents are both demanding and responsive. They exert control by setting rules and enforcing them, but they also explain the reasons for rules.
Scaffolding
Process that enables a child or novice to solve a problem, carry out a task or achieve a goal which would be beyond his unassisted efforts.
Synaptic Pruning
The process in which the brain removes neurons and synapses that it does not need.
Adolescent Egocentrism
Children have difficulty perceiving things from another's point of view.