PCSY-D-25-00041

A typology of rules for knowledge exchange in higher-order interactions

PLOS Complex Systems

Dear Dr. Silk,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS Complex Systems. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS Complex Systems's publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process.

Please submit your revised manuscript within 30 days Sep 27 2025 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at complexsystems@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pcsy/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file.

Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:

* A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'. This file does not need to include responses to any formatting updates and technical items listed in the 'Journal Requirements' section below.

* A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'.

* An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Manuscript'.

If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, competing interests statement, or data availability statement, please make these updates within the submission form at the time of resubmission. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter.

We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Rami Puzis

Academic Editor

PLOS Complex Systems

Rami Puzis

Academic Editor

PLOS Complex Systems

Hocine Cherifi

Editor-in-Chief

PLOS Complex Systems

Journal Requirements:

1. Please amend your detailed Financial Disclosure statement. This is published with the article. It must therefore be completed in full sentences and contain the exact wording you wish to be published.

i. State the initials, alongside each funding source, of each author to receive each grant.

ii. State what role the funders took in the study. If the funders had no role in your study, please state: “The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.”

2. We ask that a manuscript source file is provided at Revision. Please upload your manuscript file as a .doc, .docx, .rtf or .tex.

3. Please upload separate figure files in .tif or .eps format. Also, remove the figures from your manuscript file but keep the legends.

For more information about figure files please see our guidelines:  

https://journals.plos.org/complexsystems/s/figures 

https://journals.plos.org/complexsystems/s/figures#loc-file-requirements 

4. We have noticed that you have cited ‘Table ??’ in the manuscript file page 14 but there are no corresponding tables in the manuscript. Please amend your manuscript to include this table, noting that tables should not be uploaded as individual files.

5. We have noticed that you have uploaded Supporting Information files, but you have not included a list of legends. Please add a full list of legends for your Supporting Information files after the references list. 

6. We notice that your Supporting information are included in the manuscript file. Please remove them and upload them with the file type 'Supporting Information'. Please ensure that each Supporting Information file has a legend listed in the manuscript after the references list.

7. Please provide a complete Data Availability Statement in the submission form, ensuring you include all necessary access information or a reason for why you are unable to make your data freely accessible. If your research concerns only data provided within your submission, please write "All data are in the manuscript and/or supporting information files" as your Data Availability Statement.

8. Some material included in your submission may be copyrighted. According to PLOS’s copyright policy, authors who use figures or other material (e.g., graphics, clipart, maps) from another author or copyright holder must demonstrate or obtain permission to publish this material under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) License used by PLOS journals. Please closely review the details of PLOS’s copyright requirements here: PLOS Licenses and Copyright. If you need to request permissions from a copyright holder, you may use PLOS's Copyright Content Permission form.

Please respond directly to this email or email the journal office and provide any known details concerning your material's license terms and permissions required for reuse, even if you have not yet obtained copyright permissions or are unsure of your material's copyright compatibility. 

Potential Copyright Issues:

Figure 3 and 4: Please confirm whether you drew the images / clip-art within the figure panels by hand. If you did not draw the images, please provide (a) a link to the source of the images or icons and their license / terms of use; or (b) written permission from the copyright holder to publish the images or icons under our CC-BY 4.0 license. Alternatively, you may replace the images with open source alternatives. See these open source resources you may use to replace images / clip-art:

- https://commons.wikimedia.org

- https://openclipart.org/

If the reviewer comments include a recommendation to cite specific previously published works, please review and evaluate these publications to determine whether they are relevant and should be cited. There is no requirement to cite these works unless the editor has indicated otherwise. 

Additional Editor Comments (if provided):

Thank you for submitting this manuscript to PLOS Complex Systems. Please adhere to all minor comments and improvements proposed by the reviewers.

It is important to provide guidelines for the readers on how to use described rules in practice and more importantly how to empirically validate them.

[Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.]

Reviewers' Comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Does this manuscript meet PLOS Complex Systems’s publication criteria? Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe methodologically and ethically rigorous research with conclusions that are appropriately drawn based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Partly

**********

2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: N/A

Reviewer #2: I don't know

Reviewer #3: N/A

**********

3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available (please refer to the Data Availability Statement at the start of the manuscript PDF file)?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception. The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: No

Reviewer #3: No

**********

4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS Complex Systems does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

**********

5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: I am not really sure how to evaluate this paper overall. It is well written and sensible, but the purpose is not clear.

The organisation of different types of learning rules is excellent, with clear explanations and good diagrams and examples. The discussion about the limitations of hypergraphs is also useful.

However, I found the mathematical treatment much less compelling. It comes across as prescriptive as if the authors are saying "here are all the possible rules and the mathematical equation that should be used to describe them in any model". Ultimately, the best choice of a model rule is the one that best represents the process that is to be modelled and must be determined based on evidence about the way that learning occurs in the particular setting. And that choice should obviously be justified by the evidence.

Having said this, I think it would be useful for example rules to be available along with the description of their differences. And those idealised versions of the rules would also be useful for studies that compare the effect of a different component of learning. Unfortunately, the way the paper presents those rules suggests that a modeller making a different choice is somehow wrong.

Minor typos that I noticed as I was reading:

- Black appears as Back in caption for fig 1

- LaTeX error probably misspelled reference, line 441

Reviewer #2: The authors propose a set of rules to describe the process of knowledge exchange under higher-order interactions. The framework provided by the authors focuses on learning and discovery. The authors consider the knowledge exchange process as a contagion dependent on the topology, and high'order interactions provide additional forms of interaction. I have the following comments:

1. In the discussion of high order interactions, the authors present simplicial sets and hypergraphs Yet the presentation give details on the simplicial case, yet the hypergraph case lacks clarity please complete the discussion with an example as for the simplicial case,

2. Notice that the caption of Fig1 does not explain the subfigure b. Please complement.

3. the illustration in Fig 3, is only of a simplicial topology, how can that change if the connections are hypergraphs?

4. The authors propose a set of rules for the knowledge exchange process based on topology and considering high order interactions. Yet the list of possible rules yet the illustration of the application of the process is needed to clarify the significance of the rules and the difference or improvement on the rules by including the high order interactions.

Reviewer #3: === DISCLAIMER ===

Before writing this review, I contacted the editors because I was not sure if this manuscript fits within the usual scope of the journal. The paper is purely conceptual and does not include empirical data, simulations, or any formal validation of the framework. I was granted an extension but did not receive an answer to my question. I am proceeding with the review assuming the journal DOES accpet this type of contribution.

========

Overview:

The paper proposes a conceptual framework to think about how knowledge is shared in group interactions, not only in pairs. The authors argue that dyadic models are not enough to describe real social learning, which often happens in groups. They suggest a typology of "Knowledge Exchange Rules" (KERs), using simplicial sets to describe how knowledge flows. The examples they give help to illustrate the different types of rules.

Strengths:

- Timely Topic: Higher-order networks are becoming increasingly important. A structured way to apprehend these interactions is very welcome.

- Clear Motivation: The motivation is strong. The examples (like the debate or group work among students) clearly show why we need more than just pairwise models.

- Useful Typology: The framework is well organized. It gives a helpful way to group and describe different processes like learning and discovery.

- Good Starting Point: The mathematical expressions of some rules can help future research. It opens the door for further modeling work.

Points to Consider:

- Very Theoretical: The main issue is that everything stays abstract. It would be much better if the authors included even a small simulation to show how different rules produce different results. Right now, it’s hard to know if the typology is useful or complete.

- Discovery Rules Less Developed:*The distinction between "learning" (passing knowledge) and "discovery" (creating new knowledge) is important. But the discovery rules feel less complete. The # operator is introduced, but it is not discussed much. It would be helpful to link this to ideas like insight or group intelligence.

- How to Use It in Practice: The paper presents many options but gives little advice on how to choose between them. For example, how can a researcher know if a system follows a delta average rule or a gain fixed rule? A short discussion on this could help make the framework more usable.

Minor notes:

- The table is dense. Maybe it is better to split it into two tables, one for learning and one for discovery rules.

- The paper is generally well written, but some technical sections are a bit heavy. Some simplification could make the text more accessible.

Conclusion:

This is a thoughtful and original contribution. The framework is interesting and could be useful in many modeling studies. Its main weakness is that it stays too abstract. I recommend publication, but I believe the paper would be stronger with either a small simulation example or more discussion on how to apply the framework to real systems.

**********

6. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

Reviewer #3: No

**********

[NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.]

Figure resubmission:

While revising your submission, we strongly recommend that you use PLOS’s NAAS tool (https://ngplosjournals.pagemajik.ai/artanalysis) to test your figure files. NAAS can convert your figure files to the TIFF file type and meet basic requirements (such as print size, resolution), or provide you with a report on issues that do not meet our requirements and that NAAS cannot fix.

After uploading your figures to PLOS’s NAAS tool - https://ngplosjournals.pagemajik.ai/artanalysis, NAAS will process the files provided and display the results in the "Uploaded Files" section of the page as the processing is complete. If the uploaded figures meet our requirements (or NAAS is able to fix the files to meet our requirements), the figure will be marked as "fixed" above. If NAAS is unable to fix the files, a red "failed" label will appear above. When NAAS has confirmed that the figure files meet our requirements, please download the file via the download option, and include these NAAS processed figure files when submitting your revised manuscript.

Reproducibility:

To enhance the reproducibility of your results, we recommend that authors of applicable studies deposit laboratory protocols in protocols.io, where a protocol can be assigned its own identifier (DOI) such that it can be cited independently in the future. Additionally, PLOS ONE offers an option to publish peer-reviewed clinical study protocols. Read more information on sharing protocols at https://plos.org/protocols?utm_medium=editorial-email&utm_source=authorletters&utm_campaign=protocols

A typology of rules for knowledge exchange in higher-order interactions

PCSY-D-25-00041R1

Dear Dr. Silk,

We're pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements.

Within one week, you'll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you'll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication.

An invoice for payment will follow shortly after the formal acceptance. To ensure an efficient process, please log into Editorial Manager at https://www.editorialmanager.com/pcsy/ click the 'Update My Information' link at the top of the page, and double check that your user information is up-to-date. For questions related to billing, please contact billing support at https://plos.my.site.com/s/.

If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper to help maximize its impact. If they'll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team as soon as possible -- no later than 48 hours after receiving the formal acceptance. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact complexsystems@plos.org.

Kind regards,

Rami Puzis

Academic Editor

PLOS Complex Systems

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

The authors adequately addressed the comments of the reviewers and made the necessary changes.

Minor typesetting issues (like extra spaces before citations) can be corrected during production or proofs.

Reviewers' comments: