Why is it difficult for children and adults to follow a person's eye gaze in polynomial social relationships with compound audio-visual stimuli: An eye-tracking study.

Acquiring triadic social interactions could facilitate language and communication skills in early infancy. However, studies have rarely investigated polynomial relationships, defined as relationships among the self, two or more people, and objects. During the development from a child to an adult, the responsiveness to a preferred stimulus modality changes from visual to auditory dominance. Nevertheless, how people observe compound visual stimuli in polynomial social relationships and why it is difficult to ignore auditory cues remain unclear. Moreover, there is a need to identify differences between children's and adults' observing latencies in the time to the first fixation when detecting a stimulus. This study examined whether participants (24 adults and 19 children) demonstrated similar gaze patterns under triadic and polyadic conditions. The participants observed a target visual stimulus looked at by a face stimulus while we presented spoken names, either congruent or incongruent with the target visual stimulus. The results indicated that when the number of people in social relationships increased, children and adults decreased fixations on the target face and the stimulus and showed a shorter mean fixation duration on the face. Moreover, children had longer latencies and more fixation errors for the target stimulus, which might reflect children's difficulties in communicating with others. We expect that understanding children's communication transition from triadic to polynomial social relationships with audio-visual stimulus congruencies would facilitate understanding language development and social communication patterns.

Evaluation of outcomes and radiation complications in 65 cats with nasal tumours treated with palliative hypofractionated radiotherapy.

Feline nasal tumours (NTs) are locally invasive and occasionally metastasise to distant sites. Although palliative hypofractionated radiotherapy (HRT) is used, its efficacy and long-term complications have not been adequately evaluated. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the efficacy of HRT in treating feline malignant NTs, including monitoring improvement in clinical signs, acute and late complications, and prognosis. The medical records of 65 cats with malignant NTs treated with HRT were included. Overall survival (OS) and progression-free survival (PFS) were calculated using the Kaplan-Meier method. The log-rank test and Cox proportional hazard model were used to evaluate factors that influenced OS and PFS. Clinical signs improved in 86.2% of cats following radiotherapy. Acute complications were observed in 58.5% of cats but were manageable and acceptable. Among late complications, cataract was most frequently observed (20.5%), and atrophy of the entire eyeball and osteochondroma at the irradiation site were each observed in two cats. The median OS and PFS in 65 cats were 432 days and 229 days, respectively. No significant difference between OS of cats with nasal lymphoma and that of cats with other tumours was observed. Despite some limitations due to the retrospective nature of the study, palliative HRT for feline NTs can be considered a useful treatment option because of the high incidence of improvement and more favourable prognosis, although it may be preferable not to use the hypofractionated regimen in young cats with lymphoma that are expected to survive for a long period.