Chapter 4: Physical Changes

What should parents of a premature or low-birth-weight infant know about the physical development of their child?

-Premature infants are maturationally younger than their full-term peers, and this comparative lag in development affects the child's physical capabilities. Though preterm infants lag developmentally in the early years, by age 2 or 3 the developmental deficit can be caught up. If you compare a preterm infant and a full-term infant, born at the same time, and correct for the preterm infant's gestational age, developmental differences are minimized.

At birth, visual acuity is in the range of

20/200 to 20/400

Which of the following statements about breastfeeding is true?

Breastfeeding appears to stimulate better immune system functioning.

Which of the following factors or influences is not associated with sudden infant death syndrome?

a history of physical abuse

Which of the following faces would infants prefer?

an attractive face

Neonates sleep

as much as 80% of the time, with that time divided pretty evenly between day and night.

Up to about 6 months of age,

babies can accurately discriminate all sound contrasts that appear in any language, including sounds they do not hear in the language spoken to them.

Which of the following visual abilities appears to be almost identical in newborns and adults?

colour sensation

Which of the following is not characteristic of infants who experience early visual deprivation (e.g., due to cataracts) that is later corrected?

compensating with an improved ability to discriminate among human speech sounds

When an infant habituates or loses interest in a stimulus that has been presented repeatedly and then shows renewed interest when the stimulus is changed slightly, we can conclude that the infant

detects the difference between the original and the changed stimulus.

The synaptogenesis/pruning cycle increases the _________ of the infant's brain.

efficiency

newborns

have sense of touch and motion that are better developed than any of the other senses

Nathan is a newborn. If his mother picks him up promptly when he begins crying,

he will cry less later in infancy

Infants recognize which mouth movements go with certain sounds because they have developed the skill of

intermodal perception

Children who have serious physical or mental anomalies

move through the various motor milestones in the same sequence as other children, but at a slower pace.

Which of the following statements about infants' hearing is true?

newborns auditory acuity is actually better than their visual acuity

Nativists' arguments are supported by the fact that

newborns have so many sensory abilities early in life.

Which statement about infants' taste preferences is true?

newborns prefer sweet tastes

Which of the following illustrates the concept of habituation?

no longer noticing a ticking clock after a few moments of exposure

At what age do researchers find the ability to hear in infants?

prenatally

Newborns

respond differentially to all 5 of the basic flavours (preferring sweet and unami)

Newborns

see quite well closed up, but see poorly at a distance

Because infants have more unused synapses than adults,

they have greater plasticity and can recover from injuries to the brain more easily than adults can.

A technique developed by researchers to study depth perception in infants who are too young to crawl relies upon watching

whether the infants flinch when an object appears to be looming towards them