Maternal responsiveness to infants in three societies: the United States, France, and Japan.

This study examines and compares prominent characteristics of maternal responsiveness to infant activity during home-based naturalistic interactions of mother-infant dyads in New York City, Paris, and Tokyo. Both culture-general and culture-specific patterns of responsiveness emerged. For example, in all 3 locales infants behaved similarly, mothers also behaved similarly with respect to a hierarchy of response types, and mothers and infants manifest both specificity and mutual appropriateness in their interactions: Mothers responded to infants' exploration of the environment with encouragement to the environment, to infants' vocalizing nondistress with imitation, and to infants' vocalizing distress with nurturance. Differences in maternal responsiveness among cultures occurred to infant looking rather than to infant vocalizing and in mothers' emphasizing dyadic versus extradyadic loci of interaction. Universals of maternal responsiveness, potential sources of cultural variation, and implications of similarities and differences in responsiveness for child development in different cultural contexts are discussed.

[The single coronary artery]. / L'artère coronaire unique.

Single coronary artery is a fairly rare entity which may nevertheless be found in 0.4 per cent of coronary arteriograms. The authors report 3 cases seen in 2 departments of cardiology. In each patient, despite the existence of definite cardiovascular risk factors, this distribution was a factor worsening coronary ischemia, leading to complete thrombosis in one case. Although most often a chance discovery, a review of the literature justifies the attribution to this anomaly of the onset of angina, infarction or even sudden death.

[Color coding in vascular Doppler echography aimed at improving lesion quantification]. / Le codage couleur en échographie Doppler vasculaire. Vers une amélioration de la quantification lésionnelle.

Color flow duplex scanning diffusion is now restricted by an expansive cost. Static or dynamic range of a faint endovascular image can better be assessed by mean velocities. Pathologic high velocities allows visualisation of the direction and the width of the jet. The Doppler cursor can be correctly aligned in the jet core and allows accurate measures, and the display of spectral analysis is better with faster computers. Recently, enhancement of low flow analysis is of particular interest in pre-occlusive or occlusive vascular pathology.

[Cardiac manifestations of Lyme disease. Apropos of a case]. / Manifestations cardiaques de la maladie de Lyme. A propos d'un cas.

A new case of heart involvement in Lyme's disease is reported. Its originality lies in its strictly isolated nature, therefore revealing the disease; in its typical picture of myocardopericarditis combining, in various stages, infra-hissian conduction disorders, bouts of left ventricular insufficiency, pseudoischemic repolarisation disorders and finally a moderate pericardial shift; in the demonstration, during two successive heart explorations by NMR (Nuclear Magnetic Resonance), of a diffuse myocardial hypertrophy, subsiding in time, as the other symptoms of this patient.

Tactual habituation and discrimination of form in infancy: a comparison with vision.

Tactual discriminative abilities out of the control of vision are studied in 5-month-old infants, and compared with their visual discriminative abilities. The relevance of a habituation/reaction to novelty procedure in the tactual modality is tested. An infant control procedure is used in both modalities on 2 independent samples of 32 infants each. Habituation and discrimination occur tactually as well as visually, the duration of holds decreasing more than the duration of looks. Accumulated holding time is 3 times longer than accumulated looking time. Analogies and discrepancies between tactual and visual habituations are discussed, and the problem of sensory dominance is raised. Such results are basic to studies on cross-modal transfer, from vision to touch as well as from touch to vision.

Eye-movements of six-year-old children in two memorization tasks.

Eye movements, during the viewing phase of two memorization tasks, of 12 boys and 12 girls in a transitional period of memory development are described. The findings suggest that the development of ocular strategies parallels closely the emergence of other strategic behaviors and that information on eye movements would provide a necessary complement to the data on emerging ability to plan.

[Problems raised by the production of spatial models by blind children: an experimental study]. / Problémes posés par la reproduction de modéles spatiaux chez des enfants aveugles: une étude expérimentale

The ability to reproduct two-dimensional and threee-dimensional spatial models was tested in eighteen blind children, aged seven to eleven with two tasks (block design test and stick test). Performances and strategies were compared with those of seeing children. The results failed to show any important specific errors in blind children; despite blindness some children reached levels of performance as good as those of seeing children, while others completely failed to follow instructions. All such effects were independent of age. The problem is raised of the psychological conditions of space representation, independent of the afferences through which space is perceived.