Dear Dr Maddox,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript entitled "The when and where of auditory selective attention" for consideration as a Research Article by PLOS Biology.

Your manuscript has now been evaluated by the PLOS Biology editorial staff as well as by an academic editor with relevant expertise and I am writing to let you know that we would like to send your submission out for external peer review as a SHORT REPORT.

However, before we can send your manuscript to reviewers, we need you to complete your submission by providing the metadata that is required for full assessment. To this end, please login to Editorial Manager where you will find the paper in the 'Submissions Needing Revisions' folder on your homepage. Please click 'Revise Submission' from the Action Links and complete all additional questions in the submission questionnaire.

Once your full submission is complete, your paper will undergo a series of checks in preparation for peer review. After your manuscript has passed the checks it will be sent out for review. To provide the metadata for your submission, please Login to Editorial Manager (https://www.editorialmanager.com/pbiology) within two working days, i.e. by Jan 29 2025 11:59PM.

If your manuscript has been previously peer-reviewed at another journal, PLOS Biology is willing to work with those reviews in order to avoid re-starting the process. Submission of the previous reviews is entirely optional and our ability to use them effectively will depend on the willingness of the previous journal to confirm the content of the reports and share the reviewer identities. Please note that we reserve the right to invite additional reviewers if we consider that additional/independent reviewers are needed, although we aim to avoid this as far as possible. In our experience, working with previous reviews does save time.

If you would like us to consider previous reviewer reports, please edit your cover letter to let us know and include the name of the journal where the work was previously considered and the manuscript ID it was given. In addition, please upload a response to the reviews as a 'Prior Peer Review' file type, which should include the reports in full and a point-by-point reply detailing how you have or plan to address the reviewers' concerns.

During the process of completing your manuscript submission, you will be invited to opt-in to posting your pre-review manuscript as a bioRxiv preprint. Visit http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/s/preprints for full details. If you consent to posting your current manuscript as a preprint, please upload a single Preprint PDF.

Feel free to email us at plosbiology@plos.org if you have any queries relating to your submission.

Kind regards,

Christian

Christian Schnell, PhD

Senior Editor

PLOS Biology

cschnell@plos.org

Dear Dr Maddox,

Thank you for your patience while your manuscript "The when and where of auditory selective attention" was peer-reviewed at PLOS Biology. It has now been evaluated by the PLOS Biology editors, an Academic Editor with relevant expertise, and by several independent reviewers.

In light of the reviews, which you will find at the end of this email, we would like to invite you to revise the work to thoroughly address the reviewers' reports.

As you will see below, the reviewers think that the study your is overall well executed and provides important insights. However, in addition to the comments regarding the lack of methodological details and required textual revisions, for example regarding the length of the experiment and the impact of stimulus repetition, there is also a control experiment that will be required to address the reviewers' concerns, mentioned by Reviewer 2.

Reading the cross-comments, R2 agrees mostly with R1 and reiterates that the requested controls are necessary to support the claims in his opinion.

Given the extent of revision needed, we cannot make a decision about publication until we have seen the revised manuscript and your response to the reviewers' comments. Your revised manuscript is likely to be sent for further evaluation by all or a subset of the reviewers.

In addition to these revisions, you will need to complete some formatting changes, which you will receive in a follow up email. A member of our team will be in touch with a set of requests shortly.

We expect to receive your revised manuscript within 3 months. Please email us (plosbiology@plos.org) if you have any questions or concerns, or would like to request an extension.

At this stage, your manuscript remains formally under active consideration at our journal; please notify us by email if you do not intend to submit a revision so that we may withdraw it.

**IMPORTANT - SUBMITTING YOUR REVISION**

Your revisions should address the specific points made by each reviewer. Please submit the following files along with your revised manuscript:

1. A 'Response to Reviewers' file - this should detail your responses to the editorial requests, present a point-by-point response to all of the reviewers' comments, and indicate the changes made to the manuscript.

*NOTE: In your point-by-point response to the reviewers, please provide the full context of each review. Do not selectively quote paragraphs or sentences to reply to. The entire set of reviewer comments should be present in full and each specific point should be responded to individually, point by point.

You should also cite any additional relevant literature that has been published since the original submission and mention any additional citations in your response.

2. In addition to a clean copy of the manuscript, please also upload a 'track-changes' version of your manuscript that specifies the edits made. This should be uploaded as a "Revised Article with Changes Highlighted" file type.

*Re-submission Checklist*

When you are ready to resubmit your revised manuscript, please refer to this re-submission checklist: https://plos.io/Biology_Checklist

To submit a revised version of your manuscript, please go to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pbiology/ and log in as an Author. Click the link labelled 'Submissions Needing Revision' where you will find your submission record.

Please make sure to read the following important policies and guidelines while preparing your revision:

*Published Peer Review*

Please note while forming your response, if your article is accepted, you may have the opportunity to make the peer review history publicly available. The record will include editor decision letters (with reviews) and your responses to reviewer comments. If eligible, we will contact you to opt in or out. Please see here for more details:

https://blogs.plos.org/plos/2019/05/plos-journals-now-open-for-published-peer-review/

*PLOS Data Policy*

Please note that as a condition of publication PLOS' data policy (http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/s/data-availability) requires that you make available all data used to draw the conclusions arrived at in your manuscript. If you have not already done so, you must include any data used in your manuscript either in appropriate repositories, within the body of the manuscript, or as supporting information (N.B. this includes any numerical values that were used to generate graphs, histograms etc.). For an example see here: http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.1001908#s5

*Blot and Gel Data Policy*

We require the original, uncropped and minimally adjusted images supporting all blot and gel results reported in an article's figures or Supporting Information files. We will require these files before a manuscript can be accepted so please prepare them now, if you have not already uploaded them. Please carefully read our guidelines for how to prepare and upload this data: https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/s/figures#loc-blot-and-gel-reporting-requirements

*Protocols deposition*

To enhance the reproducibility of your results, we recommend that if applicable you deposit your 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 for publishing peer-reviewed Lab Protocol articles, which describe protocols hosted on protocols.io. Read more information on sharing protocols at https://plos.org/protocols?utm_medium=editorial-email&utm_source=authorletters&utm_campaign=protocols

Thank you again for your submission to our journal. We hope that our editorial process has been constructive thus far, and we welcome your feedback at any time. Please don't hesitate to contact us if you have any questions or comments.

Sincerely,

Christian

Christian Schnell, PhD

Senior Editor

PLOS Biology

cschnell@plos.org

------------------------------------

REVIEWS:

Reviewer #1: The manuscript by Stoll et al. is an attempt to address conflicting results about whether or not subcortical auditory responses are modulated by selective attention to speech. Data were recorded in three experiments, where two concurrent audiobooks were presented to listeners, and they either had to pay attention to one of them (Experiments 1&2) or ignore them and engage in another task of their choice (Experiment 3). They utilize a unique recording setup to obtain neural responses from the auditory nerve (CAP), brainstem (ABR), and cortex (traditional scalp-EEG), which allowed them to separate the different levels of response.

Counter to results reported in previous studies, and primarily by Forte et al., they authors find no evidence for modulation of subcortical responses by selective attention, but replicate the well-established findings of cortical modulations. Moreover, they use the stimuli from the Forte et al. study in a passive-listening paradigm to claim that previous results may be related to stimulus-specific effect rather than selective attention.

I found this paper to be quite interesting and well executed, and I appreciate the methodological rigor for demonstrating the reliability of a "null" result. I believe that this work makes an important contribution in furthering this debate, and - while it may not be conclusive - provides compelling and important empirical evidence against selective-attention effects at the brainstem level (at least when listening to 2-hour long speech!).

I do, however, have several questions and missing details that I would appreciate if the authors could clarify:

1. The stimulus-presentation scheme is not clear to me. Authors write that "The stories were ordered such that subjects could follow along, with each stimulus played twice (once attended, once ignored) so they would not miss sections of the story. At the end of each trial, subjects were asked two comprehension questions to keep them engaged in the task".

But many details are missing: Did they switch their attention between the male/female storied on each trial? Were the repetitions consecutive or were all the stimuli repeated in the 2nd half of the experiment?

2. And on a more methodological level - is it possible that repeating the same content twice could affect speech tracking? One could imagine that hearing a story that I had previously listened to might be more distracting than an entirely new story.. were any control-analysis conducted to ensure this did not have an effect?

>> the experiment was extremely long (over 2 hours!). I would expect attention to deteriorate over time or just general effects of fatigue. Can you comment on this? Did the behavioral performance change over time? This seems critical to me, since selective-attention is instructed here, but listeners may or may not have complied with this instruction, especially in such a long experiment. So. verifying that they were indeed paying attention as required is critical for interpreting the lack of selective-attention effects at the subcortical level.

3. Experiment 3: While I greatly appreciate the rationale of using the stimuli used by Forte et al. in a passive-listening design, in order to assess whether previously reported effects are potentially due to stimulus-specific features. While the distribution of single-subject data is nice to see, I am not fully convinced of this alternative explanation for several reasons:

a) Results of passive-listening paradigms are very difficult to interpret, especially if they are long, since it's hard to know what participants are actually doing/paying attention to. It is quite possible that for at least some of the time, they listened to the speech, and that one stimulus 'grabbed' their attention more consistently. Do the authors have any insight into what participants actually did during this time? It seems unlikely to me that they were actively engaged in another task 100% of the time…

b) I wonder why the authors did not use these materials in a selective-attention paradigm as well - if they were able to show that similar responses are obtained during passive listening and "active/selective" listening, then perhaps this might be more convincing.

c) I also wonder why the authors chose not to show the waveforms of the neural responses obtained in the passive-listening experiment, which offer more direct comparisons to Experiments 1&2 and to prior work.

d) The authors claim that previous results may be due to "unbalanced" presentation of target and distractor speech (i.e., that they were not repeated), however I wonder if they have a hypothesis as to what speech-features might be driving the preference for one speech-stimulus over the other in their passive-listening conditions. This would be important for testing this possibility or controlling for acoustic differences in future studies (especially since repeating the same stimuli also has substantial drawbacks, as noted above).

4. For completion, it would be helpful if the authors presented the full results for Experiment 2 as well (CAP, ABR and scalp-EEG results).

5. The "control" analysis for offset responses described briefly in the methods and in Extended Data Fig 1 sounds potentially important, but was not entirely clear to me. Could the authors please elaborate on this? One thing I found particularly confusing is that silences are not expected to be synchronized across attended and unattended speech, nor do they have constant durations (of 490-500ms). So, how should we interpret the ERPs shown here?

Also, it would be nice what "artifact" the authors were trying to correct for in the TRF by zeroing the EEG during silences. Perhaps other studies suffer from a similar "problem"?

Reviewer #2: This study investigates whether attention modulates subcortical responses using EEG and an eardrum electrode. While the methodology is rigorous, the framing of the findings is too general. For example, the title and the framing of the paper suggest there is no attentional modulation in subcortical areas, but this conclusion may depend on the type of stimulus used, the recording technique, and behavioral demands. These should be made more clear by making the claims more specific, than what is said in the title currently.

Prior studies (e.g., Slee & David, 2015) have reported subcortical attentional effects with simpler stimuli. One possibility is that attentional modulation emerges at different stages depending on stimulus complexity—when auditory features are easily separable, modulation could occur subcortically, but in complex scenes like multitalker environments, cortical processing may be required first. The study does not establish "when and where" attention acts, but rather what is observable with EEG. This distinction needs to be clearer.

The paper would also benefit from a stronger connection to theoretical models of brain function. If subcortical attention effects are absent, does this support a strictly feedforward model of auditory selection? What does this imply about how the brain processes complex acoustic scenes?

A critical missing control is in Experiment 3, where the authors argue that prior studies mistakenly attributed acoustic differences to attentional effects. However, their passive listening design does not confirm that subjects were truly disengaged. Without behavioral verification, it remains possible that subjects were involuntarily engaged with one stream over another, possibly with the more salient/engaging story. A stronger test would be an internal control within their own dataset: splitting attended and ignored stimuli into non-overlapping time segments (e.g., first half attended, second half ignored). If their claim is correct, this artificial separation should create a spurious "attention effect" purely due to acoustic differences. Without this test, their critique of prior work remains speculative. Conducting this additional control would provide a stronger argument that prior findings were driven by acoustic confounds rather than genuine attentional modulation.

Minor points:

- Justification of dichotic stimulus presentation requires more citations. (e.g. this sentence: . If the sounds were spatially separated, a much simpler scheme could be employed wherein the better ear was favored)

- In Figure 2: Would a difference plot (attend minus unattended) or an alternative visualization help clarify the effects, particularly for early vs. late responses?

Reviewer #3: This study examines how selective attention influences sound encoding along the auditory pathway. Using a novel experimental setup, Stoll et al. simultaneously record neural responses from multiple levels of the auditory system. While prior research suggested that attention might modulate subcortical processing, their findings provide strong evidence that selective attention does not impact sound encoding in the auditory periphery or brainstem, with attentional effects first emerging in the cortex.

The study is well-executed, incorporating various control experiments (e.g., diotic vs. dichotic conditions, data reanalysis using methods from Forte et al.) to account for potential null findings. Additionally, the manuscript offers a plausible explanation for at least one previous report of attentional modulation in subcortical processing.

I find this to be an excellent piece of work that merits publication. However, I have one consideration: the authors chose to repeat each stimulus twice, once attended and once unattended conditions. They have a good reason for making this choice, as changing stimuli between conditions introduces acoustic differences that might confound attention effects (as the authors suggest happened in the study by Forte et al.). However, the impact of stimulus repetition should not be overlooked—not only in terms of changes in neural responses to first vs second stimulus presentation, but also regarding cognitive factors such as task engagement and cognitive load. Could the repetition of stimuli have reduced the likelihood of detecting an attentional effect?

Dear Ross,

Thank you for your patience while we considered your revised manuscript "The auditory brainstem response to natural speech is not affected by selective attention" for publication as a Short Reports at PLOS Biology. This revised version of your manuscript has been evaluated by the PLOS Biology editors and two of the original reviewers.

Based on the reviews, we are likely to accept this manuscript for publication, provided you satisfactorily address the following data and other policy-related requests:

* Short Reports can only have four figures. We suggest combining figures 3/4 and 5/6 into one figure each to not exceed the limit. Figure 6 could also be moved to the supplementary information, in which case you'd need to combine only figures 3 and 4 into one.

* Please add the links to the funding agencies in the Financial Disclosure statement in the manuscript details.

* Please include the approval/license number and IRB names for all three experiments.

* Please specify for all three experiments whether the participants provided written or verbal consent, and include information whether the study has been conducted according to the principles expressed in the Declaration of Helsinki.

* DATA POLICY:

You may be aware of the PLOS Data Policy, which requires that all data be made available without restriction: http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/s/data-availability. For more information, please also see this editorial: http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.1001797

Note that we do not require all raw data. Rather, we ask that all individual quantitative observations that underlie the data summarized in the figures and results of your paper be made available in one of the following forms:

1) Supplementary files (e.g., excel). Please ensure that all data files are uploaded as 'Supporting Information' and are invariably referred to (in the manuscript, figure legends, and the Description field when uploading your files) using the following format verbatim: S1 Data, S2 Data, etc. Multiple panels of a single or even several figures can be included as multiple sheets in one excel file that is saved using exactly the following convention: S1_Data.xlsx (using an underscore).

2) Deposition in a publicly available repository. Please also provide the accession code or a reviewer link so that we may view your data before publication.

Regardless of the method selected, please ensure that you provide the individual numerical values that underlie the summary data displayed in the following figure panels as they are essential for readers to assess your analysis and to reproduce it: 1CD

NOTE: the numerical data provided should include all replicates AND the way in which the plotted mean and errors were derived (it should not present only the mean/average values).

Please also ensure that figure legends in your manuscript include information on where the underlying data can be found, and ensure your supplemental data file/s has a legend.

Please ensure that your Data Statement in the submission system accurately describes where your data can be found.

* CODE POLICY

Per journal policy, if you have generated any custom code during the course of this investigation, please make it available without restrictions. Please ensure that the code is sufficiently well documented and reusable, and that your Data Statement in the Editorial Manager submission system accurately describes where your code can be found.

Please note that we cannot accept sole deposition of code in GitHub, as this could be changed after publication. However, you can archive this version of your publicly available GitHub code to Zenodo. Once you do this, it will generate a DOI number, which you will need to provide in the Data Accessibility Statement (you are welcome to also provide the GitHub access information). See the process for doing this here: https://docs.github.com/en/repositories/archiving-a-github-repository/referencing-and-citing-content

As you address these items, please take this last chance to review your reference list to ensure that it is complete and correct. If you have cited papers that have been retracted, please include the rationale for doing so in the manuscript text, or remove these references and replace them with relevant current references. Any changes to the reference list should be mentioned in the cover letter that accompanies your revised manuscript.

In addition to these revisions, you may need to complete some formatting changes, which you will receive in a follow up email. A member of our team will be in touch with a set of requests shortly. If you do not receive a separate email within a few days, please assume that checks have been completed, and no additional changes are required.

We expect to receive your revised manuscript within two weeks.

To submit your revision, please go to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pbiology/ and log in as an Author. Click the link labelled 'Submissions Needing Revision' to find your submission record. Your revised submission must include the following:

- a cover letter that should detail your responses to any editorial requests, if applicable, and whether changes have been made to the reference list

- a Response to Reviewers file that provides a detailed response to the reviewers' comments (if applicable, if not applicable please do not delete your existing 'Response to Reviewers' file.)

- a track-changes file indicating any changes that you have made to the manuscript.

NOTE: If Supporting Information files are included with your article, note that these are not copyedited and will be published as they are submitted. Please ensure that these files are legible and of high quality (at least 300 dpi) in an easily accessible file format. For this reason, please be aware that any references listed in an SI file will not be indexed. For more information, see our Supporting Information guidelines:

https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/s/supporting-information

*Published Peer Review History*

Please note that you may have the opportunity to make the peer review history publicly available. The record will include editor decision letters (with reviews) and your responses to reviewer comments. If eligible, we will contact you to opt in or out. Please see here for more details:

https://plos.org/published-peer-review-history/

*Press*

Should you, your institution's press office or the journal office choose to press release your paper, please ensure you have opted out of Early Article Posting on the submission form. We ask that you notify us as soon as possible if you or your institution is planning to press release the article.

*Protocols deposition*

To enhance the reproducibility of your results, we recommend that if applicable you deposit your 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 for publishing peer-reviewed Lab Protocol articles, which describe protocols hosted on protocols.io. Read more information on sharing protocols at https://plos.org/protocols?utm_medium=editorial-email&utm_source=authorletters&utm_campaign=protocols

Please do not hesitate to contact me should you have any questions.

Sincerely,

Christian

Christian Schnell, PhD

Senior Editor

cschnell@plos.org

PLOS Biology

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Reviewer remarks:

Reviewer #1: The authors have addressed my comments successfully, and I appreciate their candid discussion of the limitations of the study alongside its added benefit and unique contribution.

Reviewer #3: I thank the authors for replying to my question. I have no further comments.

Dear Ross,

Thank you for your patience while we considered your revised manuscript "The auditory brainstem response to natural speech is not affected by selective attention" for publication as a Short Reports at PLOS Biology. This revised version of your manuscript has been evaluated by the PLOS Biology editors and the Academic Editor.

While most of the editorial requests have been addressed in the revision, a few points remain open:

* DATA POLICY:

You may be aware of the PLOS Data Policy, which requires that all data be made available without restriction: http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/s/data-availability. For more information, please also see this editorial: http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.1001797

Note that we do not require all raw data. Rather, we ask that all individual quantitative observations that underlie the data summarized in the figures and results of your paper be made available in one of the following forms:

1) Supplementary files (e.g., excel). Please ensure that all data files are uploaded as 'Supporting Information' and are invariably referred to (in the manuscript, figure legends, and the Description field when uploading your files) using the following format verbatim: S1 Data, S2 Data, etc. Multiple panels of a single or even several figures can be included as multiple sheets in one excel file that is saved using exactly the following convention: S1_Data.xlsx (using an underscore).

2) Deposition in a publicly available repository. Please also provide the accession code or a reviewer link so that we may view your data before publication.

Regardless of the method selected, please ensure that you provide the individual numerical values that underlie the summary data displayed in the following figure panels as they are essential for readers to assess your analysis and to reproduce it: 1CD

NOTE: the numerical data provided should include all replicates AND the way in which the plotted mean and errors were derived (it should not present only the mean/average values).

Please also ensure that figure legends in your manuscript include information on where the underlying data can be found, and ensure your supplemental data file/s has a legend.

Please ensure that your Data Statement in the submission system accurately describes where your data can be found.

* CODE POLICY

Per journal policy, if you have generated any custom code during the course of this investigation, please make it available without restrictions. Please ensure that the code is sufficiently well documented and reusable, and that your Data Statement in the Editorial Manager submission system accurately describes where your code can be found.

Please note that we cannot accept sole deposition of code in GitHub, as this could be changed after publication. However, you can archive this version of your publicly available GitHub code to Zenodo. Once you do this, it will generate a DOI number, which you will need to provide in the Data Accessibility Statement (you are welcome to also provide the GitHub access information). See the process for doing this here: https://docs.github.com/en/repositories/archiving-a-github-repository/referencing-and-citing-content

* I noted that you provide a link to a repository, but this was not accessible. In case the code is deposited there with a DOI, that would be sufficient. But please ensure the repository is accessible so we can ensure it meets the requirements.

As you address these items, please take this last chance to review your reference list to ensure that it is complete and correct. If you have cited papers that have been retracted, please include the rationale for doing so in the manuscript text, or remove these references and replace them with relevant current references. Any changes to the reference list should be mentioned in the cover letter that accompanies your revised manuscript.

In addition to these revisions, you may need to complete some formatting changes, which you will receive in a follow up email. A member of our team will be in touch with a set of requests shortly. If you do not receive a separate email within a few days, please assume that checks have been completed, and no additional changes are required.

We expect to receive your revised manuscript within two weeks.

To submit your revision, please go to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pbiology/ and log in as an Author. Click the link labelled 'Submissions Needing Revision' to find your submission record. Your revised submission must include the following:

- a cover letter that should detail your responses to any editorial requests, if applicable, and whether changes have been made to the reference list

- a Response to Reviewers file that provides a detailed response to the reviewers' comments (if applicable, if not applicable please do not delete your existing 'Response to Reviewers' file.)

- a track-changes file indicating any changes that you have made to the manuscript.

NOTE: If Supporting Information files are included with your article, note that these are not copyedited and will be published as they are submitted. Please ensure that these files are legible and of high quality (at least 300 dpi) in an easily accessible file format. For this reason, please be aware that any references listed in an SI file will not be indexed. For more information, see our Supporting Information guidelines:

https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/s/supporting-information

*Published Peer Review History*

Please note that you may have the opportunity to make the peer review history publicly available. The record will include editor decision letters (with reviews) and your responses to reviewer comments. If eligible, we will contact you to opt in or out. Please see here for more details:

https://plos.org/published-peer-review-history/

*Press*

Should you, your institution's press office or the journal office choose to press release your paper, please ensure you have opted out of Early Article Posting on the submission form. We ask that you notify us as soon as possible if you or your institution is planning to press release the article.

*Protocols deposition*

To enhance the reproducibility of your results, we recommend that if applicable you deposit your 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 for publishing peer-reviewed Lab Protocol articles, which describe protocols hosted on protocols.io. Read more information on sharing protocols at https://plos.org/protocols?utm_medium=editorial-email&utm_source=authorletters&utm_campaign=protocols

Please do not hesitate to contact me should you have any questions.

Sincerely,

Christian

Christian Schnell, PhD

Senior Editor

cschnell@plos.org

PLOS Biology

Dear Ross,

Thank you for the submission of your revised Short Reports "The auditory brainstem response to natural speech is not affected by selective attention" for publication in PLOS Biology. On behalf of my colleagues and the Academic Editor, David Poeppel, I am pleased to say that we can in principle accept your manuscript for publication, provided you address any remaining formatting and reporting issues. These will be detailed in an email you should receive within 2-3 business days from our colleagues in the journal operations team; no action is required from you until then. Please note that we will not be able to formally accept your manuscript and schedule it for publication until you have completed any requested changes.

While you attend to those requests to come, please also make sure to reference the source data. Please cite the location of the data clearly in the legend of Figure 1, e.g. “The data underlying this Figure can be found in doi:10.18112/openneuro.ds006434 Code/Results/exp1Diotic/mags+lats.csv”

Please take a minute to log into Editorial Manager at http://www.editorialmanager.com/pbiology/, click the "Update My Information" link at the top of the page, and update your user information to ensure an efficient production process.

PRESS

We frequently collaborate with press offices. If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper at this point, to enable them to help maximise its impact. If the press office is planning to promote your findings, we would be grateful if they could coordinate with biologypress@plos.org. If you have previously opted in to the early version process, we ask that you notify us immediately of any press plans so that we may opt out on your behalf.

We also ask that you take this opportunity to read our Embargo Policy regarding the discussion, promotion and media coverage of work that is yet to be published by PLOS. As your manuscript is not yet published, it is bound by the conditions of our Embargo Policy. Please be aware that this policy is in place both to ensure that any press coverage of your article is fully substantiated and to provide a direct link between such coverage and the published work. For full details of our Embargo Policy, please visit http://www.plos.org/about/media-inquiries/embargo-policy/.

Thank you again for choosing PLOS Biology for publication and supporting Open Access publishing. We look forward to publishing your study. 

Sincerely, 

Christian

Christian Schnell, PhD

Senior Editor

PLOS Biology

cschnell@plos.org