Explanatory and pragmatic attitudes in therapeutical trials.

It is the thesis of this paper that most therapeutic trials are inadequately formulated, and this from the earliest stages of their conception. Their inadequacy is basic, in that the trials may be aimed at the solution of one or other of two radically different kinds of problem; the resulting ambiguity affects the definition of the treatments, the assessment of the results, the choice of subjects and the way in which the treatments are compared. It often occurs that one type of approach is ethically less defensible than the other, or may even be ruled out altogether on ethical grounds.

Manual skill, hand skill asymmetry, and cognitive performances in young children.

A total of 1022 children aged 3 to 6 years were examined in their preschools and 27% of them were followed up for 2 years. A computerised version of the peg-moving task was used repeatedly to assess hand skill of the dominant and the nondominant hand. Cognitive performance was repeatedly evaluated by tasks involving speech, vocabulary, phonological memory, and visual-spatial skills.