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PSY 210
Chapter 3
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Norm | An average, or standard, calculated from many individuals within a specific group or population. |
| REM (Rapid Eye Movement) | A stage of sleep characterized by flickering eyes behind closed lids, indicating dreaming. |
| Co-Sleeping | A custom in which parents and their children (usually infants) sleep in the same room. |
| Bed-Sharing | When two or more people share the same bed. |
| Head-Sparing | A biological mechanism that protects the brain from when malnutrition disrupts body growth. |
| Neurons | Nerve cells in the central nervous system, especially in the brain. |
| Cortex | The outer layers of the brain in humans and other mammals.Most thinking, feeling, and sensing involve the cortex. |
| Prefrontal Cortex | The are of the cortex at the very front of the brain that specializes in anticipation[ation, planning, and impulse control. |
| Axons | Fibers that extend from neurons and transmit electrochemical impulses from that neuron to the dendrites of other neurons. |
| Dendrites | Fibers that extend from neurons and receive electrochemical impulses transmitted from other neurons via their axons. |
| Synapses | The intersection between the axon of the neuron and the dendrites of other neurons. |
| Neurotransmitters | Brain chemicals that carry information from the axon of a sending neuron to the dendrites of a receiving neuron. |
| Pruning | When applied to brain development, the process by which unused connections in the brain atrophy and die. |
| Experience-Expectant | Brain functions that require certain basic common experience (which an infant is expected to have) in order to develop normally. |
| Experience-Dependent | Brain functions that depend on particular, variable experience and therefore may or may not develop in a particular person. |
| Shaken Baby Syndrome | A life-threatening injury that occurs when an infant is forcefully shaken back and forth, a motion that ruptures blood vessels in the brain and breaks neural connections. |
| Sensation | The response of a sensory system when it detects a stimulus. |
| Perception | The mental processing of sensory information when the brain interprets a sensation. |
| Motor Skills | The learned abilities to move some part of the body, in actions ranging from a large leap to a flicker of the eye lids. |
| Gross Motor Skills | Physical abilities involving large body movements, such as walking and jumping. |
| Fine Motor Skills | Physical abilities involving small body movements, especially of the hands and fingers, such as drawing and picking up a coin. |
| SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome) | An infant's unexpected, sudden death; when a seemingly healthy baby, usually between 2 and 6 months old, stops breathing and dies while asleep. |
| Protein Calorie Malnutrition | A condition in which a person does not consume sufficient food. This can cause illness, severe weight loss, and even death. |
| Stunting | The failure of children to grow to a normal height for their age due to severe and chronic malnutrition. |
| Wasting | The tendency for children to be severely underweight for their weight as a result of malnutrition. |
| Sensorimotor Intelligence | Piaget's term for the way infants think - by using their senses and motor skills - during the first period of cognitive development nt. |
| Object Permanence | The realization that objects, including people, still exist even if they can no longer see, touch, or hear them. |
| Information-Processing Theory | A perspective that compares human thinking processes to computer analysis of data, including sensory input, connections, stored memories, and output. |
| Mean Length of Utterance | The average number of meaningful sound combination in a typical sentence. |
| LAD (Language Acquisition Device) | Chomsky's term for hypothesized mental structure that enables humans to learn language, including the basic aspects of grammar, vocabulary, and intonation. |