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The present study integrates four primary social cognition processes Joint Attention(JA), Intention Detection(ID), Per-spective Taking(PT), and Social Reference(SR) into lively comic scenarios in order to disentangle their relationships andpossible one-to-one connections. By using eye-tracking technique, gaze patterns in terms of Total Fixation Durationwere considered as indexes to examine the hypotheses. It is found that PT is positively correlated with JA, ID, and SRwhereas JA is positively correlated with ID and PT. As a criteria-related validation, the scores of Geneva Social CognitionScale(GeSoCS) were used to delineate the gaze performance. Participants with higher score in GeSoCS showed differenteye-movement patterns to those with lower score, indicating the pattern of eye movements could be a reliable indicatorof social cognition status. Moreover, the correlations revealed in the present study suggest that close connections existbetween social cognition processes and eye gaze scanning toward pictorial scenarios.

Introduction: Off-season upsurge of respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) infection with changed characteristics and heightened clinical severity during the postCOVID-19 era are raising serious concerns. This study aimed to develop and validate a nomogram for predicting the risk of severe acute lower respiratory tract infection (SALRTI) in children hospitalized for RSV infection during the postCOVID-19 era using machine learning techniques. Methods: A multicenter retrospective study was performed in nine tertiary hospitals in Yunnan, China, enrolling children hospitalized for RSV infection at seven of the nine participating hospitals during January–December 2023 into the development dataset. Thirty-nine variables covering demographic, clinical, and laboratory characteristics were collected. Primary screening and dimension reduction of data were performed using Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator (LASSO) regression, followed by identification of independent risk factors for RSV-associated SALRTI using Logistic regression, thus finally establishing a predictive nomogram model. Performance of the nomogram was internally evaluated by receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve, calibration curve, and decision curve analysis (DCA) based on the development dataset. External validation of our model was conducted using same methods based on two independent RSV cohorts comprising pediatric RSV inpatients from another two participating hospitals between January– March 2024. Results: The development dataset included 1102 patients, 239 (21.7%) of whom developed SALRTI; while the external validation dataset included 249 patients (142 in Lincang subset and 107 in Dali subset), 58 (23.3%) of whom were diagnosed as SALRTI. Nine variables, including age, preterm birth, underlying condition, seizures, neutrophil-lymphocyte ratio (NLR), interleukin-6 (IL-6), lactate dehydrogenase (LDH), D-dimer, and co-infection, were eventually confirmed as the independent risk factors of RSV-associated SALRTI. A predictive nomogram was established via integrating these nine predictors. In both internal and external validations, ROC curves indicated that the nomogram had satisfactory discrimination ability, calibration curves demonstrated good agreement between the nomogram-predicted and observed probabilities of outcome, and DCA showed that the nomogram possessed favorable clinical application potential. Conclusion: A novel nomogram combining several common clinical and inflammatory indicators was successfully developed to predict RSV-associated SALRTI. Good performance and clinical effectiveness of this model were confirmed by internal and external validations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While many scholarly works are concerned with how social protests promote democratization, this article addresses the causally reverse question: how democratization shapes the landscape of street protests. We use a unique database of 31 years of protest events in Taiwan, a smooth and successful case of authoritarianism-to-democracy transition, to engage in a dialogue with political transition theory, the institutionalization thesis and networked movement theory. The logistic regression analysis indicates that protest violence persists under consolidated democracy, but it is marginalized. We find an indirect effect from the growth of social movement organizations that foster the adaptation of festive and performative tactics, which are less confrontational in nature. Politicians' involvement, however, remains a constant source of disruptiveness. Our conclusion of contentious institutionalization finds that late-democratizing countries also gravitate towards becoming a 'social movement society' as advanced democracies do, but in a highly compressed period of time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People can report summary statistics for various features about a group of objects. One theory is that different abilities support ensemble judgments about low-level features like color versus high-level features like identity. Existing research mostly evaluates such claims based on evidence of correlations within and between feature domains. However, correlations between two identical tasks that only differ in the type of feature that is used can be inflated by method variance. Another concern is that conclusions about high-level features are mostly based on faces. We used latent variable methods on data from 237 participants to investigate the abilities supporting low-level and high-level feature ensemble judgments. Ensemble judgment was measured with six distinct tests, each requiring judgments for a distinct low-level or high-level feature, using different task requirements. We also controlled for other general visual abilities when examining how low-level and high-level ensemble abilities relate to each other. Confirmatory factor analyses showed a perfect correlation between the two factors, suggesting a single ability. There was a unique relationship between these two factors beyond the influence of object recognition and perceptual speed. Additional results from 117 of the same participants also ruled out the role of working memory. This study provides strong evidence of a general ensemble judgment ability across a wide range of features at the latent level and characterizes its relationship to other visual abilities. Public Significance Statement: People can summarize what a similar group of objects looks like to quickly gain general information about what they are seeing. This work suggests that some people are better than others at making such judgments, and that the same ability predicts performance for judgments about simple visual features or those about complex object shapes. This ability is also related to performance recognizing individual objects. This suggests visual abilities apply across a variety of situations and can therefore predict performance in many real-world settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]