PONE-D-21-02432

Binocular fusion enhances the efficiency of spot-the-difference gameplay

PLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Bharadwaj,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’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.

Two expert reviewers have assessed your work. Both reviewers find the study and it's results interesting, but both note that the manuscript is at times lacking in scientific rigor. I particularly agree with both authors that the binocular mechanisms which underlie your findings need to be better discussed. Reviewer 1 further raises some methodological issues which should be addressed, and suggests that portions of the manuscript should be re-written to better fit a scientific publication. Finally, I cannot find anywhere the data underlying your results. Please note that Plos ONE policy requires your raw data to be publicly available, so you should either provide these data as supplementary information or upload them to a public data repository (e.g. Zenodo) and include the link to the deposit in your manuscript. 

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We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

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Guido Maiello

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: No

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3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). 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

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

PLOS ONE 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

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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: This is a nice paper that makes a cute point about how spot-the-difference games can be quickly solved via binocular fusion of the difference-image pairs. Although the study does not provide any new theoretical insights into the mechanisms for detecting interocular differences in contrast, it has the merit of potentially appealing to a broad audience given the popularity of spot-the-difference gameplay. The paper is well-written, the methods sound and the results convincing. My only suggestion for improvement is that it would have been nice if the authors could say a little more about what are believed to be the underlying mechanisms for the detection of interocular contrast differences and what they think are the ecological situations in which these mechanisms are deployed by vision. There have been a number of recent papers on the subject of interocular contrast difference detection which a quick search will reveal and these could form the basis of a more general discussion of the topic.

Reviewer #2: Stats are ok but incomplete. I didn't check for data availability.

Other comments are in the attached file

just typing to reach the minimum character limit in the system................................

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: Yes: Alexandre Reynaud

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Attachments

Attachment

Submitted filename: reviewPlos.odt

PONE-D-21-02432R1

Binocular fusion enhances the efficiency of spot-the-difference gameplay

PLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Bharadwaj,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’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.

Reviewer 2 has confirmed that you have successfully addressed all their previous comments. Given the substantial restructuring of your paper, I think your final Discussion and Conclusion section is now appropriate for the journal. The reviewer has also provided some final suggestions regarding the interpretation of your study that I would ask you to consider and incorporate in your manuscript. I don't think these minor points should be controversial to address, so I will most likely assess your final revisions directly, with no need for further review. I look forward to receiving your revised manuscript. 

Please submit your revised manuscript by Aug 05 2021 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 plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ 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 academic editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'.
• 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, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter.

If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols. 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.

We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Guido Maiello

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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Please 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 rebuttal letter that accompanies your revised manuscript. If you need to cite a retracted article, indicate the article’s retracted status in the References list and also include a citation and full reference for the retraction notice.

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.

Reviewer #2: All comments have been addressed

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2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

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

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). 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 #2: (No Response)

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

PLOS ONE 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 #2: Yes

**********

6. 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 #2: I appreciate the efforts made by the authors and the new rearrangement of the manuscript. I still think the general conclusion reads more like a guide on how to optimally play a game than a scientific article. But I will let the editors judge if those are in line with the editorial policies of the journal. Otherwise, I only have minor issues regarding some points which I think should be discussed a bit more thoroughly in the sub-discussions parts.

I think some hypothesis why no effect of contrast is observed for both luminance and color conditions should be discussed.

Why the detection in the color condition is faster than the luminance condition should be discussed as well.

Specific points:

Line 52: I don’t think people would play a game if they think it is laborious.

Line 431: “The strength of binocular lustre is thought to be mediated by the amount of neuronal conflict between the ON and OFF-centered ganglion cells in the retina, when stimulated with luminance patches of opposite polarities.” And Line 636 “This blending-in may be the result of a weak or no neuronal conflict between the ON- and OFF-centered retinal ganglion cells when the inter-pair polarity of the local feature difference was in the same direction, relative to when they were of opposite polarity.” This is more likely to originate in V1 than in the retina.

Line 547: “The chances of experiencing chromatic lustre and, thus, the ease of identifying such image-pairs in the spot-the-difference game has been shown to increase with stimulus saturation and is expected to be somewhat lesser in the red-green color direction than in the blue-yellow direction.” Why?

Line 671: you can’t say it is independent on those parameters. It is only independent in the range you tested.

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Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #2: No

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While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step.

Binocular fusion enhances the efficiency of spot-the-difference gameplay

PONE-D-21-02432R2

Dear Dr. Bharadwaj,

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.

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Guido Maiello

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

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