A quick response, but not too much: Experienced mangabeys (Cercocebus torquatus) lose interest in contact call exchanges that do not respect this "conversational rule".

Several non-human primate species engage in vocal exchanges of contact calls, throughout the day in peaceful contexts. These vocal exchanges have been compared to human conversations because vocalizations are uttered in turn-taking: a temporal pattern where interlocutors minimize silences and avoid overlaps. But observing such a pattern in the spontaneous production of a species, as is the case with red-capped mangabeys (Cercocebus torquatus), is not enough to make it a rule.

Of the importance to reconsider individual variability in infant studies: Family traits do impact turn-taking perception in 6-month-olds.

Turn-taking is a universal pattern of human conversations characterized by a fast exchange of turns between speakers and an avoidance of overlaps. Language is embedded in this conversational skill acquired well before it during infancy, through everyday interactions with caregivers. The earliness of this skill and its link with language allows us to test whether social environment shapes early language development.

Social factors drive vocal exchanges in red-capped mangabeys (Cercocebus torquatus).

Of all the calls made by non-human primates, the function of short-distance contact calls has largely remained to be determined. These calls are the most frequent in the repertoire and are most often exchanged between individuals in a non-random way. To our knowledge, no study has ever examined how vocal exchanges are structured in red-capped mangabeys (Cercocebus torquatus), a semi-terrestrial monkey living in the African forest with a complex semi-tolerant/semi-despotic social system.

Experiences of parents and caregivers in pediatric intensive care units: A qualitative study.

Background: In pediatric intensive care units (PICUs), parents and healthcare professionals attend to children who verbally and non-verbally express their pain and suffering, fears, anxieties, desires, and wishes in complex intensive care situations. What can we learn from these experiences to improve the way we can take care of and support children?

Objectives: The main objective of this clinical ethics study was to focus on the experience stories of parents during their child's hospitalization in a PICU, to analyze their discourse, and to propose an ethical perspective.

Method: The current research collects the experience reports of parents during their child's hospitalization in a PICU and those of the caregivers who treated them.

The vocal repertoire of preterm infants: Characteristics and possible applications.

We investigated infants' capacities to express themselves orally at very early developmental stages. Most reports focus on crying when in pain or hungry. We evaluated young preterm infants' spontaneous vocal production in non-painful contexts.

A novel, short and easy-to-perform method to evaluate newborns' social olfactory preferences.

Humans' early olfactory perception has been studied mainly within the framework of mother-offspring interactions and only a few studies have focused on newborns' abilities to discriminate body odors per se. The aim of this study was to develop a method to evaluate olfactory social preferences of infants at term-equivalent age. Twenty dyads of infants (10 born preterm and 10 born at term) at term-equivalent age and their mothers were included.

Higher tactile sensitivity in preterm infants at term-equivalent age: A pilot study.

Despite a growing body of research on perinatal sensory abilities, data on the extent of tactile sensitivity and more particularly passive touch (i.e. sensitivity to a stimulation imposed on the skin) are relatively limited, and the development and processing of tactile function are still thus little known.

Cortical Pain Response of Newborn Infants to Venepuncture: A Randomized Controlled Trial Comparing Analgesic Effects of Sucrose Versus Breastfeeding.

Objective: Sucrose administration and breastfeeding decrease behavioral expressions of pain in neonates. However, recent studies indicated that there is a persistent cortical response with sucrose. This study compared the efficacy of sucrose administration versus breastfeeding to decrease cortical responses to pain during venepuncture.

The human newborn's umwelt: Unexplored pathways and perspectives.

Historically, newborns, and especially premature newborns, were thought to "feel nothing." However, over the past decades, a growing body of evidence has shown that newborns are aware of their environment, but the extent and the onset of some sensory capacities remain largely unknown. The goal of this review is to update our current knowledge concerning newborns' perceptual world and how ready they are to cope with an entirely different sensory environment following birth.

Subsocial Cockroaches Nauphoeta cinerea Mate Indiscriminately with Kin Despite High Costs of Inbreeding.

Many animals have evolved strategies to reduce risks of inbreeding and its deleterious effects on the progeny. In social arthropods, such as the eusocial ants and bees, inbreeding avoidance is typically achieved by the dispersal of breeders from their native colony. However studies in presocial insects suggest that kin discrimination during mate choice may be a more common mechanism in socially simpler species with no reproductive division of labour.

Unexpected behavioural consequences of preterm newborns' clothing.

Restrictions of preterm newborns' movements could have consequences ranging from stress enhancement to impairment of their motor development. Therefore, ability to freely express motor activities appears crucial for their behavioural and physiological development. Our aim was to evaluate behavioural issues of two types of clothing used in NICU.

Locomotor Inhibition in Adult Horses Faced to Stressors: A Single Postpartum Experience May be Enough!

Despite the number of postpartum handling that a newborn experiences, few studies focus on their long-term consequences. In rats, regular long separations from the mother, during the early life, led to modifications of the locomotor activity when the animal is confronted to a stressor. In horses, one component of the behavioral response to stressful situation is active locomotion.

Differential outcomes of unilateral interferences at birth.

Behavioural modifications, including modifications of emotional reactivity, can occur following early experience such as handling (manual rubbing). Here, we investigated the effects of unilateral tactile stimulation at an early stage on emotional reactions later on. We handled newborn foals intensively on one side of their body.

Social integration of robots into groups of cockroaches to control self-organized choices.

Collective behavior based on self-organization has been shown in group-living animals from insects to vertebrates. These findings have stimulated engineers to investigate approaches for the coordination of autonomous multirobot systems based on self-organization. In this experimental study, we show collective decision-making by mixed groups of cockroaches and socially integrated autonomous robots, leading to shared shelter selection.

The co-activation of snapshot memories in wood ants.

Insects can guide themselves along a familiar route to a familiar place by retrieving and using visual snapshots that they have stored both along the route and at their destination and moving so that their current views match the target snapshots. To learn more about the matching process, we have investigated the interaction of snapshots by engineering a situation in which ants simultaneously retrieve two sets of memories. Ants were trained from a fixed start position to feed in one site, after which the feeder was switched to a new one.

Switching destinations: memory change in wood ants.

We have studied the changing use of spatial memories in wood ants by charting how the ants' paths transform when ants are first trained to feed at one site and must then switch to another site. Because ants, which are trained to approach a single feeding site from a single starting point, are attracted directly to that goal when started from unfamiliar positions, we describe the ants' paths in terms of the use of two stored snapshots. Each snapshot consists of retinotopic views of the ants' surroundings acquired at one of the two feeding sites.

Exploitation of home range and spatial distribution of resources in German cockroaches (Dictyoptera: Blattellidae).

We analyzed the expression of edge following behavior in German cockroaches, Blattella germanica (L.). Structure of the environment and spatial distribution of resources modified both expression of locomotory behavior of cockroaches and its distribution between the edge and the central area of an experimental arena.

The binding and recall of snapshot memories in wood ants (Formica rufa L.).

Insects can locate spatial goals by means of 2-D retinotopic views of the surrounding landmarks, which they memorise from the vantage point of the goal. Wood ants acquire such snapshot memories while fixating conspicuous landmarks with frontal retina, and their snapshots extend horizontally at least 120 degrees into the periphery. Are spatially separate items within such an extended snapshot bound together so that a snapshot is recalled as a whole, or are its components recognised individually? We approached this question by training ants to find food midway between two upright black cylinders of different sizes and then examined where they searched when they were given two cylinders of the same size.

Route learning by insects.

Ants and other insects often follow fixed routes from their nest to a foraging site. The shape of an ant's route is set, initially, by navigational strategies, such as path integration and the ant's innate responses to landmarks, which depend minimally on memory. With increasing experience, these early routes are stabilised through the learning of views of landmarks and of associated actions.

Improvement of German cockroach (Dictyoptera: Blattellidae) population control by fragmented distribution of gel baits.

The aim of this study was to test the efficiency of gels in relation to fragmentation of baits and population density against the German cockroach, Blattella germanica (L.). We hypothesized that the efficiency of cockroach control could be improved by fragmentation of gel baits, i.

Snapshot memories and landmark guidance in wood ants.

Insects are thought to pinpoint a place by using memorized "snapshots," i.e., two-dimensional retinotopic views of the surrounding landmarks recorded when at the place (reviewed in ).

Influence of a novel object in the home range of the cockroach, Blattella germanica.

We investigated whether exploratory behaviour of the cockroach, Blattella germanica (L.) (Dictyoptera: Blattellidae), was modified by the introduction of a novel object, such as a bait station, into their familiar home range. In particular, we measured the attractiveness of boxes, as novel objects, in relation to their complexity and to their contents.

Evidence for a lectin activity for human interleukin 3 and modeling of its carbohydrate recognition domain.

We demonstrate that human interleukin 3 (IL-3) is a lectin recognizing specifically the glycosaminoglycan part of a chondroitin sulfate proteoglycan (PGS3; Normand, G., Kuchler, S., Meyer, A.

Function and molecular modeling of the interaction between human interleukin 6 and its HNK-1 oligosaccharide ligands.

Interleukin 6 (IL-6) is endowed with a lectin activity for oligosaccharide ligands possessing the HNK-1 epitope (3-sulfated glucuronic acid) found on some mammalian glycoprotein N-glycans (Cebo, C., Dambrouck, T., Maes, E.