[Evaluation of children's neuropsychological syndromes]. / Evaluación de los síndromes neuropsicológicos infantiles.

INTRODUCTION: A new instrument of neuropsychological assessment, the Luria Neuropsychological Diagnostic Battery, has recently become available in Spain. This battery is based on a revision of the Luria Neuropsychological Diagnostic (Christensen, 1975) and has been standardized by Manga and Ramos (1991) to be used with children from 7 through 10 years old. DEVELOPMENT: This battery will be very useful for the neuropsychological evaluation of learning disabled and brain damaged children because profiles obtained based on it can be used to organize the treatment program based on the strengths and weaknesses of the child. A programme of psychological and pedagogical individualized intervention must start from a comprehensive evaluation, from an evaluation of the children as a whole person. The aim of our research is to produce several intervention (rehabilitation) principles for children with brain dysfunction, brain damaged and others clinical disorders, arose from neuropsychological assessment and from research works of psychological processes. We have realized clinical research with developmental dyslexic children, hyperactive children and epileptic children.

p53 immunostaining is a highly specific and moderately sensitive marker of malignancy in serous fluid cytology.

Several studies have suggested that p53 immunostaining does not occur in benign mesothelium but is common in malignancies involving the serous surfaces, including malignant mesothelioma. As a result, p53 has been advocated as a marker of malignancy in serous fluid cytology. However, the specificity of p53 in this context has been brought into question by some studies that claim to have found immunostaining in benign mesothelium. The aim of our study was to examine p53 immunostaining in a large series of serous fluids to try to resolve the uncertainty. Monoclonal Do-7 antibody was used to immunostain ethanol-fixed cytospin preparations employing an alkaline phosphatase method. Positivity was found in 17 of 35 malignant effusions, including two probable mesotheliomas, but was not found in any of 115 benign effusions. Our study suggests that p53 immunostaining is a highly specific and moderately sensitive marker of malignancy in serous fluids.

Haptic discrimination of bilateral symmetry in 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional unfamiliar displays.

In five experiments, we tested the accuracy and sensitivity of the haptic system in detecting bilateral symmetry of raised-line shapes (Experiments 1 and 2) and unfamiliar 3-D objects (Experiments 3-5) under different time constraints and different modes of exploration. Touch was moderately accurate for detecting this property in raised displays. Experiment 1 showed that asymmetric judgments were systematically more accurate than were symmetric judgements with scanning by one finger. Experiments 2 confirmed the results of Experiment 1 but also showed that bimanual exploration facilitated processing of symmetric shapes without improving asymmetric detections. Bimanual exploration of 3-D objects was very accurate and significantly facilitated processing of symmetric objects under different time constraints (Experiment 3). Unimanual exploration did not differ from bimanual exploration (Experiment 4), but restricting hand movements to one enclosure reduced performance significantly (Experiment 5). Spatial reference information, signal detection measures, and hand movements in processing bilateral symmetry by touch are discussed.

The effects of variation of an irrelevant dimension on same-different visual judgments.

In a series of experiments observers judged whether two visual tachistoscopically presented shapes were the same or different in a relevant dimension, and had to ignore the graded variation on an irrelevant dimension that appeared concurrently with the relevant dimension. Experimental results from judgments in orientation, size and brightness failed to support the normalization hypothesis. The hypothesis predicts a monotonous increase in RTs with the increasing degree of disparity in the irrelevant dimension in same as well as in different comparisons. The results were interpreted in terms of the type of dimensions used to construct the shapes. It was suggested that with separable stimulus dimensions normalization would not be necessary. However, interference might appear when the stimuli to be compared were generated from a combination of more integral dimensions.

Visual hemispheric asymmetry and right-left confusion.

From 357 university students two groups of 8 women each were selected, one group with high right-left confusion and the other without such confusion according to self-reports. Reaction times to stimuli tachistoscopically presented in visual hemifields were recorded to estimate the relationship between perceptual asymmetry and right-left confusion. A significant difference between hemifields and an interaction of hemifield by group appeared, whereas asymmetry in the highly confused group was not so related. According to a model of cerebral functioning in the formation of the body image, these results suggest subjects with high right-left confusion have greater hemispheric bilateralization.