Intuitive assessment of spatial navigation beyond episodic memory: Feasibility and proof of concept in middle-aged and elderly individuals

Sophia Rekers; Michael Niedeggen

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0270563

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionAugust 2, 2021
26 Nov 2021 Decision Letter - Xiaoang Wan, Editor PONE-D-21-24950 Intuitive assessment of spatial navigation beyond episodic memory: Feasibility and proof of concept in middle-aged and elderly individuals PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Rekers, Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we have decided that your manuscript does not meet our criteria for publication and must therefore be rejected. One of the reviewers has raised concersn that cannot be easily addressed by revision. I am sorry that we cannot be more positive on this occasion, but hope that you appreciate the reasons for this decision. Yours sincerely, Xiaoang Wan Academic Editor PLOS ONE [Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.] 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: Partly ******** 2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 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: Yes ****** 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 ****** 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: The authors introduced a novel paradigm to assess spatial navigation. It is well designed both conceptually and methodologically. The new paradigm primarily focuses on visuospatial rather than episodic memory abilities. The materials used in the paradigm are videos of real-life hallways and some other high ecological fragments. Most importantly, the paradigm could be easily applied to research in the older population. To my knowledge, it is a novel and innovative work in the area. The experiment is well designed to test the feasibility and validity of the paradigm. Thus, I recommend this work to be published. Reviewer #2: The present work developed a new paradigm to assess spatial navigation ability in older adults. And authors verified the feasibility and construct validity of the new paradigm, and found para-digm was sensitive to age and education. Specifically, the age of adults influenced the associa-tion of the navigation assessment with working memory as a driving factor. 1， Authors have conducted a lot of relevant analysis in the present study based on the small sample of 34 participants. The result found in this study is not convincing. Thus, I suggest that more participants are needed to prove the validity of the results. 2， In order to make the distribution of each participant’s data clearer, I suggest authors add the scatter plots of correlation results ****** 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. If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public. 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 #1: No Reviewer #2: 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.] - - - - - For journal use only: PONEDEC3 https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0270563.r001
Revision 1
20 Jan 2022 Author Response Dear Dr. Rekers, Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we have decided that your manuscript does not meet our criteria for publication and must therefore be rejected. One of the reviewers has raised concersn that cannot be easily addressed by revision. I am sorry that we cannot be more positive on this occasion, but hope that you appreciate the reasons for this decision. Yours sincerely, Xiaoang Wan Academic Editor PLOS ONE Response by the authors: From our appraisal of the review, the concern mentioned by Prof. Wan refers to Reviewer #2’s comment on the “small” sample of 34 older participants. We address this point in detail in the section below, where this concern was raised. [Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.] 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: Partly Response by the authors: From our appraisal of the review, the sole argument raised by Reviewer #2 with regard to soundness of the manuscript concerned the “small” sample of 34 participants. We address this point in detail in the section below, where this concern was raised. ________________________________________ 2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ________________________________________ 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: Yes ________________________________________ 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 ________________________________________ 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: The authors introduced a novel paradigm to assess spatial navigation. It is well designed both conceptually and methodologically. The new paradigm primarily focuses on visuospatial rather than episodic memory abilities. The materials used in the paradigm are videos of real-life hallways and some other high ecological fragments. Most importantly, the paradigm could be easily applied to research in the older population. To my knowledge, it is a novel and innovative work in the area. The experiment is well designed to test the feasibility and validity of the paradigm. Thus, I recommend this work to be published. Response by the authors: We thank Reviewer #1 for this positive evaluation of our manuscript and the appreciation of the merit of the new paradigm. Reviewer #2: The present work developed a new paradigm to assess spatial navigation ability in older adults. And authors verified the feasibility and construct validity of the new paradigm, and found paradigm was sensitive to age and education. Specifically, the age of adults influenced the association of the navigation assessment with working memory as a driving factor. 1. Authors have conducted a lot of relevant analysis in the present study based on the small sample of 34 participants. The result found in this study is not convincing. Thus, I suggest that more participants are needed to prove the validity of the results. Response by the authors: While we agree that 34 participants would not be sufficient for a study aiming to assess the paradigm’s psychometric properties, this was not the objective of this work. As stated in the abstract and throughout the manuscript, this proof of concept study was specifically designed to introduce the concept of the new method, test the feasibility and provide information for future studies ‘[…] investigating the assessment’s psychometric properties in larger samples […]‘. A sample size of 34 participants is in line with PLOS ONE’s validation criterion for publishing methods: “This requirement may be met by including a proof-of-principle experiment or analysis; if this is not possible, a discussion of the possible applications and some preliminary analysis may be sufficient.” Furthermore, several recent PLOS ONE publications have presented paradigms in behavioral and experimental studies using similar sample sizes (mean n = 24.7, median n = 24, range = 7-47, exact publications listed in the Point-by-point response document). Lastly, we would like to contend from a statistical point of view that an a priori power analysis indicated that a sample size of 34 was sufficient for detecting statistically significant effects of key variables affecting performance in the novel paradigm, with an effect size of r = .40 (α = .05, power = .80). In fact, post-hoc analyses confirmed that the detected effects referred to in the Comments to the Author by Reviewer #2 achieved statistical powers of .97 for sensitivity to age, .89 for sensitivity to education, and .71 for correlation with working memory. 2. In order to make the distribution of each participant’s data clearer, I suggest authors add the scatter plots of correlation results Response by the authors: We thank Reviewer #2 for the thoughtful suggestion of adding scatter plots to illustrate significant correlation results between the navigation performance and other cognitive measures, which we added to the manuscript as Figure 3 in the Supporting information. To illustrate the impact of participant age, these are also color coded according to age and effect size, exact p values, and regression lines with confidence intervals are added for easy appraisal of the size and robustness of the effects. ________________________________________ Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: RebuttalLetter_with_ResponsetoReviewers.pdf https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0270563.r002
14 Jun 2022 Decision Letter - Amir-Homayoun Javadi, Editor Intuitive assessment of spatial navigation beyond episodic memory: Feasibility and proof of concept in middle-aged and elderly individuals PONE-D-21-24950R1 Dear Dr. Rekers, 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 http://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/, click the 'Update My Information' link at the top of the page, and double check that your user information is up-to-date. If you have any billing related questions, please contact our Author Billing department directly at authorbilling@plos.org. 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 onepress@plos.org. Kind regards, Amir-Homayoun Javadi, PhD Academic Editor PLOS ONE Journal requirements: When submitting your revision, we need you to address these additional requirements. 1. Please ensure that your manuscript meets PLOS ONE's style requirements, including those for file naming. The PLOS ONE style templates can be found at https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=wjVg/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_main_body.pdf and https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=ba62/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_title_authors_affiliations.pdf. 2. Please ensure that you refer to Figure 3 in your text as, if accepted, production will need this reference to link the reader to the figure. 3. Please upload a copy of Supporting Files S1 and S2 which you refer to in your text on pages 10 and 14, respectively. 4. Please update your submission to use the PLOS LaTeX template. The template and more information on our requirements for LaTeX submissions can be found at http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/latex. 5. We notice that your manuscript file was uploaded on July 30, 2021. Please can you upload the latest version of your revised manuscript as the main article file, ensuring that does not contain any tracked changes or highlighting. This will be used in the production process if your manuscript is accepted. Please follow this link for more information: http://blogs.PLOS.org/everyone/2011/05/10/how-to-submit-your-revised-manuscript/ 6.We note that your manuscript is not formatted using one of PLOS ONE’s accepted file types. Please reattach your manuscript as one of the following file types: .doc, .docx, .rtf, or .tex (accompanied by a .pdf). If your submission was prepared in LaTex, please submit your manuscript file in PDF format and attach your .tex file as “other.” 7. Please amend your current ethics statement to include the full name of the ethics committee/institutional review board(s) that approved your specific study. Additional Editor Comments (optional): Reviewers' comments: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0270563.r003
Formally Accepted
30 Jun 2022 Acceptance Letter - Amir-Homayoun Javadi, Editor PONE-D-21-24950R1 Intuitive assessment of spatial navigation beyond episodic memory: Feasibility and proof of concept in middle-aged and elderly individuals Dear Dr. Rekers: I'm pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been deemed suitable for publication in PLOS ONE. Congratulations! Your manuscript is now with our production department. If your institution or institutions have a press office, please let them know about your upcoming paper now to help maximize its impact. If they'll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team within the next 48 hours. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information please contact onepress@plos.org. If we can help with anything else, please email us at plosone@plos.org. Thank you for submitting your work to PLOS ONE and supporting open access. Kind regards, PLOS ONE Editorial Office Staff on behalf of Dr. Amir-Homayoun Javadi Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0270563.r004

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