3.8 What Have You Learned?

1. In what ways do a baby’s weight and length change in the first two years?

2. Describe the process of communication within the central nervous system.

3. Why is pruning an essential part of brain development?

4. What should caregivers remember about brain development when an infant cries?

5. How do a baby’s sleep patterns change over the first 18 months?

6. What is the relationship among perception, sensation, and cognition?

7. How does an infant’s vision change over the first three months?

8. Give examples to describe how an infant’s gross motor skills develop over the first year.

9. Describe how a baby’s hand skills develop over the first two years.

10. Why has there been a decrease in infant mortality rates? What other measures could lead to a further decrease?

11. What is the purpose of immunization?

12. In what ways does herd immunity save lives?

13. Why has the rate of immunization decreased over the past decade?

14. What are the reasons for and against breastfeeding until a child is at least 1 year old?

15. In what ways does malnutrition affect infants and children?

16. Why did Piaget call cognition in the first two years “sensorimotor intelligence”?

17. Describe the first two stages of sensorimotor intelligence.

18. In sensorimotor intelligence, what is the difference between stages three and four?

19. Why is the concept of object permanence important to an infant’s development?

20. What does the active experimentation of the stage-five toddler suggest for parents?

21. Why did Piaget underestimate how rapidly early cognition occurs?

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22. What conditions help 3-month-olds remember something?

23. What have researchers discovered about the way adults talk to babies?

24. How would a caregiver who subscribes to the behaviourist theory of language learning respond when an infant babbles?

25. What is typical of the rate and nature of the first words that infants speak?

26. What indicates that toddlers use some grammar?

27. According to behaviourism, how do adults teach infants to talk?

28. According to sociocultural theory, why do infants try to communicate?

29. What is Chomsky’s theory about how young children learn language?

30. What does the hybrid model of language learning suggest to caregivers?