You have been accepted to a summer research program and are assigned to a mentor that focuses her efforts on studying nervous system development in infants. Your main job is to collect data while watching 36-month-olds respond to different types of stimuli while wearing an EEG cap which continuously monitors brain waves. All of these take with you sitting across from the babies at table while they sit on their mothers lap. The first objects you present are two stuffed animals. One with a smiling face and one with a frowning face. With this data you seek to understand if infants have a preference for positive emotions by reaching for the animal with the smiling face. The second sensory stimulus is a recording of their mothers voice from a tape recorder sitting on the table. You alternate playing this with different recording of another womans voice that the baby shouldnt recognize from another recorder on the table. You wonder if babies will show preference for the recording of their mothers voice by looking at the recording device playing her voice for longer periods of time. The third and final item is food. You present the babies with food that the mothers claim to have eaten a great deal of while pregnant as well as those she did not. Here you test whether or not a babys food preference mirrors what was ingested while he/she is growing and developing in utero. This is a great test to finish up on as the babies often fall asleep after being fed. Which of the following is correct regarding the nervous system processing that is occurring during these tests in the babies?. Of the following options, choose the one statement that properly describes the above scenario. Reject all the rest. For full points you must also provide an explanation for each case. Defend the correct choice with adequate justification. For those that are false, explain why they are incorrect.

Accept/ Reject: The efferent division of the babys nervous system is allowing them to decipher the stuffed animals with the smiling and frowning faces through processing information detected by chemoreceptors within the eyes.

Accept/ Reject: After eating food, the babies become sleepy because there is increased activation of their parasympathetic nervous system.

Accept/ Reject: The occipital lobes process the auditory stimuli of their mothers voice, while the temporal lobes allow them to make sense of the visual image of the recorder playing the two presented voices.

Accept/ Reject: The gray matter, or axons of neurons, within the brain processes incoming information associated with the different stimuli, while the white matter, or cell bodies, transmits action potentials between different regions of the brain.

Accept/ Reject: You imagine that a majority of the information processing is occurring in the contralateral hemisphere within the brainstem as that is where we house the higher order thinking functions that define us as humans.