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Child Development - A Thematic Approach
, Fifth Edition
Danuta Bukatko - College of the Holy Cross
Marvin W. Daehler - University of Massachusetts, Amherst
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| | Glossary Terms
A | B |
C | D | E |
F | G | H |
I | J | K |
L | M | N |
O | P | Q |
R | S | T |
U | V | W |
X | Y | Z
Attention
State of alertness or arousal that allows the individual to focus on a selected aspect of the environment.
Categorical perception
Inability to distinguish among sounds that vary on some basic physical dimension except when those sounds lie at opposite sides of a critical juncture point on that dimension.
Conditioned response (CR)
Learned response that is exhibited to a previously neutral stimulus (CS) as a result of pairing the CS with an unconditioned stimulus (UCS).
Conditioned stimulus (CS)
Neutral stimulus that begins to elicit a response similar to the unconditioned stimulus (UCS) with which it has been paired.
Deferred imitation
Ability to imitate a model’s behavior hours, days, and even weeks after observation.
Dishabituation
See Recovery from habituation.
Externality effect
Tendency for infants younger than two months to focus on the external features of a complex stimulus and explore the internal features less systematically.
Habituation
Gradual decline in intensity, frequency, or duration of a response over repeated or lengthy occurrences of the same stimulus.
Implicit leaning
Abstract knowledge not available to conscious reflection acquired incidentally from processing structured information.
Intermodal perception
Coordination of sensory information to perceive or make inferences about the characteristics of an object.
Kinetic cue
Perceptual information provided by movement of eyes, head, or body. Important source of information for depth perception.
Negative punishment
Removal or loss of a desired stimulus or reward that weakens or decreases the frequency of a preceding response.
Negative reinforcement
Removal of an aversive stimulus that strengthens a preceding response.
Perception
Process of organizing and interpreting sensory information.
Perceptual differentiation
Process postulated by Eleanor and James Gibson in which experience contributes to the ability to make increasingly finer perceptual discriminations and to distinguish stimulation arising from each sensory modality.
Phoneme
Smallest unit of sound that changes the meanings of words.
Positive punishment
An aversive stimulus that serves to weaken or decrease the frequency of a preceding response.
Positive reinforcement
Occurrence of a stimulus that strengthens a preceding response. Also known as a reward.
Recovery from habituation
Reinstatement of the intensity, frequency, or duration of a response to a stimulus that has changed. Also called dishabituation.
Saccade
Rapid eye movement to inspect an object or view a stimulus in the periphery of the visual field.
Sensation
Basic information in the external world that is processed by the sensory receptors.
Smooth visual pursuit
Consistent, unbroken tracking by the eyes that serves to maintain focus on a moving visual target.
Sound localization
Ability to determine a sound’s point of origin.
Stereopsis
Ability to perceive a single image of an object even though perceptual input is binocular and differs slightly for each eye; significant source of cues for depth perception.
Unconditioned response (UCR)
Response that is automatically elicited by the unconditioned stimulus (UCS).
Unconditioned stimulus (UCS)
Stimulus that, without prior training, elicits a reflexlike response (unconditioned response).
Vergence
Ability of the eyes to rotate in opposite directions to fixate on objects at different distances; improves rapidly during first few months after birth.
Visual accommodation
Visuomotor process by which small involuntary muscles change the shape of the lens of the eye so that images of objects seen at different distances are brought into focus on the retina.
Visual acuity
Ability to make fine discriminations among elements in a visual array by detecting contours, transitions in light patterns that signal borders and edges.
Visual cliff
Experimental apparatus used to test depth perception in which the surface on one side of a glass-covered table is made to appear far below the surface on the other side.
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