Enduring Themes & Developmental Methods
How to study individual differences
What is twin studies?
The stage of most rapid development
What is the embryo stage?
This area of the brain is associated with executive functioning
What is the prefrontal cortex?
At what age does visual acuity develop in newborn infants
2 to 3 months
The age that a human baby begins reaching/grasping for objects
3-4 months old
What is as one increases the other increases
The age of vitality (earliest time at which baby may survive on its own if born)
What is 28 weeks?
This process that continues through early adulthood involves eliminating certain synapses / neural connections
What is pruning
The visual acuity of a five-week-old is
20/120
The age at which the palmar grasp reflex disappears
3-4 months
The correlation coefficient “r” measures what
What is the strength of the relationship between two variables?
“Breathing”, grasping, swallowing, and sucking originate in this stage
What is the fetal stage?
Proportion of variance that is due to genetic differences in a population
What is heritability?
"52% of individual differences in IQ in a population can be attributed to differences in genes (and 48% to differences in environments)"
The type of knowledge that involves existing understanding of concepts and social interactions
What is top-down knowledge
For infants, object locations are remembered relative to own position when location is first learned
What is Piaget's egocentric representation?
Advantages of Naturalistic observation vs Structured (Lab)
What is naturalistic has high external validity and structured has high internal validity
This study revealed that babies show a preference for hearing familiar patterns after birth, meaning they can hear prenatally and remember what they hear
What is the "Cat in the Hat" study?
Plasticity contributes to the fact that some things (e.g. language, stereopsis) can only be learned within a predetermined time window called ____
What is sensitive/critical periods
The primary technique used to test visual activity in Frantz's study
What is preferential looking?
Set of studies that demonstrated that crawlers show more hesitation to crawl than non-crawlers at the same age when faced with a dangerous scenario
What is the Visual Cliff Studies?
A study measuring reading ability in the same individuals from preschool through 2nd grade is best studied with this developmental design
Longitudinal
LBW (low birth weight), respiratory and digestive illness, colic, sleep disturbances, and irritability are associated with this teratogen
A musical child joining band is an example of this type of gene-environment correlation
What is active gene-environment correlation?
The main purpose of the rod-and-block study
Researching whether infants can perceive object continuity
The study that placed infants under specific circumstances which demonstrated that the stepping reflex never disappeared
What is the water study (or weight study) by E. Thelen?