Physical Development
Reaction time, flexibility, and sensory acuity generally decline in this broad developmental stage that spans most of the human lifespan.
Adulthood
In this first stage of Piaget's model, infants learn about the world through senses and motor actions.
Sensorimotor
The smallest distinctive sound units in a language—for example /p/ or /th/—are called this.
Phonemes
The emotional bond that causes infants to seek closeness to caregivers and show distress on separation.
Attachment
The type of learning in which a neutral stimulus becomes able to evoke a response after being paired with a stimulus that naturally produces that response.
Classical conditioning
The onset of menarche and spermarche signals the beginning of this major developmental milestone.
Puberty
A child believing the sun “wants to go to bed” exemplifies this preoperational thinking error.
Animism
Combining words like “want cookie” before learning syntax is characteristic of this early language stage.
Telegraphic speech
A parenting style high in expectations and high in emotional support is called this.
Authoritative
A school of psychology that confines itself to the study of observable and quantifiable aspects of behavior and excludes subjective phenomena, such as emotions or motives.
Behaviorism
The newborn’s automatic turning of the head toward a touch on the cheek demonstrates this reflex.
Rooting reflex
The ability to mentally reverse a sequence of events—gained in the concrete operational stage—is known as this.
Reversibility
“Goed,” “eated,” and “throwed” illustrate this rule-based language error common in young children.
Overgeneralization
In Ainsworth’s Strange Situation, children who explore freely, show distress when the caregiver leaves, and seek comfort on return demonstrate this attachment style.
Secure attachment
B.F. Skinner’s learning method in which behavior changes because of its consequences.
These harmful agents—such as drugs or viruses—can damage an embryo or fetus during prenatal development.
Teratogens
Vygotsky argued children learn best when provided structured support from mentors, a process called this.
Scaffolding
According to the sensitive periods chart, infant phoneme discrimination narrows as early as 6–8 months, a process known as this.
Perceptual narrowing
Elkind’s terms for adolescent egocentrism include these two phenomena: one imagining others constantly watching, one believing personal uniqueness.
Imaginary audience and the personal fable
Before conditioning, the sound of a tone produced no salivation response at all. This made the tone an example of this type of stimulus.
Neutral stimulus
Crawling, walking, and running are examples of this type of motor development involving large muscle groups.
Gross motor skills
Piaget said older children develop the capacity for hypothetical reasoning and abstract thought in this stage.
Formal operational stage
Understanding from context that “He kicked the bucket” means he died, not that he hit a bucket, involves this component of language.
Semantics
This theory explains how multiple layers of environment—from immediate family to cultural values and historical context—interact to shape a child’s social and emotional development.
Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory
Using a conditioned stimulus as if it were an unconditioned stimulus in order to condition a new stimulus, such as pairing a light with a tone that already elicits salivation, illustrates this advanced form of associative learning.
Higher-order conditioning