Developmental Research Methods
This type of research design allows you to make causal inferences
An experiment
A specialized ultrasound can detect an embryo's heartbeat by the 6th week of pregnancy, counting from last menstrual period. This is the same as _____ weeks after conception.
4 weeks
Reaching and grasping is a motor milestone that typically occurs in infants at this age
3-4 months
The capacity of the brain to be shaped by experience and to recover from injury is referred to as
Plasticity
The photoreceptors of the eye that are most sensitive to color vision are
Cones
A researcher wants to know how much the average vocabulary size changes between 3 and 5 years of age. The researchers decide they should use this type of study design to address this question
Cross-sectional
The period of greatest vulnerability to teratogens during prenatal development is
4 weeks after conception (embryonic stage)
Fixed patterns of action that occur in response to particular stimulation are called this
Reflexes
Newborns' _____ can be tested by measuring preference between pairs of sinusoidal gratings (stripes) of varying frequencies
Visual acuity
A researcher brings babies into the lab before they've learned how to crawl to see how the babies' approach to stairs changed as they learn to crawl. This type of study design is
A microgenetic study
Jamie has had long-term financial stress during pregnancy. This has lead to wear-and-tear on her organ systems. These compounded burdens of stress over time may have adverse physiological effects and is termed
Allostatic load
Self-locomotion often leads to improvements in
Spatial representation
The part of the neuron that conducts a signal away from the cell body towards the next cell is called
The ability to use perspective as a cue for depth typically emerges at age
5-7 months (later than the other visual cues)
The magnitude of the r value allows you to measure
Casper & Spence (1986) tested infants who had or had not been been exposed to the story The Cat in the Hat prenatally. They found that those infants who had been exposure to The Cat in the Hat....
Thelen's studies of the stepping reflex were important because they demonstrated that
Factors besides genetic mutation are responsible for motor development
Maisie (a baby) once watched the show Bluey with her mom. If she never watches Bluey again, the synapses that were created would be lost. This neural process is referred to as
Pruning
In the "rod and block" experiment by Johnson & Aslin, infants were surprised to see two rods instead of one when the block was removed. This result showed that infants could use _____ as a cue for object segregation
Common motion
Observational/naturalistic studies
The non-nutritive (or high amplitude) sucking paradigm is a technique to assess ________ in newborns
Infants' self-locomotion helps improve their spatial knowledge of the world around them. This illustrates the ________ theme
Active child
Loss of myelination around the axon of a cell would most likely effect
The speed of electrical signaling
Binocular disparity allows the integration of visual information, a process known as ______; this allows infants to develop the ability to distinguish objects, and this important visual skill is called _______.
Stereopsis; Depth perception