The effects of aging and musicianship on the use of auditory streaming cues

Sarah A. Sauvé; Jeremy Marozeau; Benjamin Rich Zendel

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0274631

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionJanuary 4, 2022
19 May 2022 Decision Letter - Qian-Jie Fu, Editor PONE-D-22-00276The effects of aging and musicianship on the use of auditory streaming cuesPLOS ONE Dear Dr. Sauvé, 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. Please submit your revised manuscript by Jul 03 2022 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: https://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, Qian-Jie Fu, Ph.D. 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 [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: Yes ******** 2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: I Don't Know 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: No ****** 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: In their study, the authors examine stream segregation ability in young and older musicians and non-musicians to separate known influences of musicality and age. They examine the role of specific stimulus parameters, such as intensity, and spectral and temporal envelope. They replicate the influence of musicality, but find no general age-related deficit in stream segregation. However, older people are more likely to use the intensity dimension than younger people and musicians, who are more likely to use the entire set of all manipulated dimensions. The study is interesting both in terms of music perception and (even more generally) stream segregation, a skill that plays an important role in everyday life, and in terms of age and age-related changes in listening and cognitive processing of auditory stimuli. The manuscript is well structured and gives a good theoretical introduction to the topic, the hypotheses are clearly founded and derived from theory. The two experiments are well designed and conducted, the analysis seems appropriate and up-to-date, the results are quite clear and adequately discussed. However, a few points are unclear and should be revised before a decision can be made about publication in PLOSone. General: The role of hearing loss is unclear. In the introduction, this is mentioned as a possible influencing factor, but then not systematically varied. One possibility could be to treat age and hearing loss as two independent variables, for example, to differentiate younger and older subjects into groups with normal and reduced hearing. Further comments: Line 178: The reference to the Gold MSI could be supplemented with a reference to the following chapter 2.1.2, where it is described in more detail. Table 2: This table is very confusing, perhaps 2 separate tables with one for intensity and a second for spectral envelope would be more convenient. Line 449: A visualization of the stimuli used in experiment 2 (similar to figure 1) and the experimental procedure would be helpful. Line 563: "The redrawing of the results of Experiment 1 on a dissimilarity scale in Fig 4 reveals ...". Shouldn't reference be made here to Figs. 4 and 5? Line 594: "as neither PTA nor PTA8kHz (analysis not reported)" Citing an analysis not reported as evidence seems inappropriate to me. Either the analysis should be described as an appendix or the reference should be deleted. Figures 2, 4, 5: The difference between the groups is hardly visible, perhaps colors could be used to better differentiate the curves. Reviewer #2: Thank you for the opportunity to review this manuscript. I just have a few questions / comments. Line 80 – Low frequency stimuli were used, and this was the region of normal hearing in both young and old groups. The differences in PTA was in the high frequencies. Line 107 – perhaps higher harmonics are not resolved due to broader auditory filters Line 256 – I understand that the variable of interest is the intensity difference, but how does one know if the absolute intensity does not affect the baseline performance? For example, I’m thinking of many psychoacoustic studies showing psychometric function, where differing changes along one scale has small or large affects on performance. Line 340, 398 - This suggested that even at higher difficulties there were differences in performance between musicians and non-musicians, but the model as described in 336 does not include significant interactions. Am I misunderstanding why some models include significant interactions, and others don’t? Line 423 – Also see Tejani et al, 2017, JASA who didn’t see effects of aging on sequential streaming. Line 639 - Madsen et al, 2019, Sci Reports is relevant here in that they found musician advantage in psychoacoustic tasks, but it didn’t translate into advantages for speech understanding in noise. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-46728-1 ****** 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.] 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. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0274631.r001
Revision 1
27 Jul 2022 Author Response Reviewer #1: In their study, the authors examine stream segregation ability in young and older musicians and non-musicians to separate known influences of musicality and age. They examine the role of specific stimulus parameters, such as intensity, and spectral and temporal envelope. They replicate the influence of musicality, but find no general age-related deficit in stream segregation. However, older people are more likely to use the intensity dimension than younger people and musicians, who are more likely to use the entire set of all manipulated dimensions. The study is interesting both in terms of music perception and (even more generally) stream segregation, a skill that plays an important role in everyday life, and in terms of age and age-related changes in listening and cognitive processing of auditory stimuli. The manuscript is well structured and gives a good theoretical introduction to the topic, the hypotheses are clearly founded and derived from theory. The two experiments are well designed and conducted, the analysis seems appropriate and up-to-date, the results are quite clear and adequately discussed. However, a few points are unclear and should be revised before a decision can be made about publication in PLOSone. General: The role of hearing loss is unclear. In the introduction, this is mentioned as a possible influencing factor, but then not systematically varied. One possibility could be to treat age and hearing loss as two independent variables, for example, to differentiate younger and older subjects into groups with normal and reduced hearing. We do not have the data to properly address the hearing loss issue, because none of our participants met the criteria for hearing loss (>25 dB HL PTA). Accordingly, in this data set Aging and PTA effectively measure the same thing. Future work should recruit participants with hearing loss in both younger and older adults to properly tease this apart. We have added a sentence in the introduction and discussion acknowledging that age and hearing loss are independently important, but that hearing loss was not systematically varied. Line 162-163: “Accordingly, both age and hearing loss will be important variables to consider independently.” Line 608-612: “A more systematic variation of hearing loss as it interacts with age (i.e. younger and older adults with or without hearing loss) may have helped differentiate between effects of age and hearing loss. However, the results of our current study, as designed, suggest that a different explanation must be sought […]” Further comments: Line 178: The reference to the Gold MSI could be supplemented with a reference to the following chapter 2.1.2, where it is described in more detail. Reference to section 2.1.2 has been added. Table 2: This table is very confusing, perhaps 2 separate tables with one for intensity and a second for spectral envelope would be more convenient. Table 2 is now Tables 2 and 3. Line 449: A visualization of the stimuli used in experiment 2 (similar to figure 1) and the experimental procedure would be helpful. We have created a figure (Fig 3) to describe the stimuli used Experiment 2 as well as examples of pair judgements. Line 563: "The redrawing of the results of Experiment 1 on a dissimilarity scale in Fig 4 reveals ...". Shouldn't reference be made here to Figs. 4 and 5? Yes, thank you, reference is now to both figures. (Line 579) Line 594: "as neither PTA nor PTA8kHz (analysis not reported)" Citing an analysis not reported as evidence seems inappropriate to me. Either the analysis should be described as an appendix or the reference should be deleted. Reference to the unreported analysis has been removed. Figures 2, 4, 5: The difference between the groups is hardly visible, perhaps colors could be used to better differentiate the curves. Figures have been redone with a colour-blind friendly palette. Reviewer #2: Thank you for the opportunity to review this manuscript. I just have a few questions / comments. Line 80 – Low frequency stimuli were used, and this was the region of normal hearing in both young and old groups. The differences in PTA was in the high frequencies. We have modified this sentence so that it now reads: Line 79-82: “Despite these PTA differences between older and younger adults, there was no difference in streaming perception between the groups. This may be because the stimuli were all below 1000 Hz, and both groups of participants had normal thresholds at those frequencies. ” Line 107 – perhaps higher harmonics are not resolved due to broader auditory filters This possibility has been added: Line 108-110: “It is possible that these higher harmonics were not resolved due to broader auditory filters (40), which are specifically associated with hearing loss rather than increased age (41).” Line 256 – I understand that the variable of interest is the intensity difference, but how does one know if the absolute intensity does not affect the baseline performance? For example, I’m thinking of many psychoacoustic studies showing psychometric function, where differing changes along one scale has small or large affects on performance. This is a good question. With our design, it is not possible to know how absolute intensity may have affected performance. As far as we know, no study has compared stream segregation at different overall intensities; intensity is always manipulated. We tested for differences in performance according to the dB at which the stimuli were set to present and found no effect. It is a caveat now explicitly acknowledged in the Stimuli section and the discussion: Line 258-259: “This affects the absolute intensity at which the stimuli were presented, which may affect baseline performance […]” Line 413-416: “Performance was also not significantly related to differences in the intensity at which stimuli were presented through the headphones, suggesting that there are not significant differences in baseline performance as a function of absolute intensity.” Line 340, 398 - This suggested that even at higher difficulties there were differences in performance between musicians and non-musicians, but the model as described in 336 does not include significant interactions. Am I misunderstanding why some models include significant interactions, and others don’t? The text at the locations identified does not describe an interaction but a main effect, highlighting that the effect is maintained even as the task gets more difficult. To clarify, the sentences have been simplified and now read as follows: Line 349-350: “Participants with higher musical training scores were better at detecting deviants overall.” Line 405-407: “More importantly, people with higher musical training scores were better able to make use of all features of the distractor at all levels of difference from the target.” Line 423 – Also see Tejani et al, 2017, JASA who didn’t see effects of aging on sequential streaming. This reference has been added to the introduction and discussion. Line 639 - Madsen et al, 2019, Sci Reports is relevant here in that they found musician advantage in psychoacoustic tasks, but it didn’t translate into advantages for speech understanding in noise. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-46728-1 A sentence summarizing this finding has been added: Line 658-664: “Indeed, Madsen et al. (80) found that while musical training was associated with better frequency discrimination, interaural time difference discrimination and attentive tracking, this advantage did not extend to speech-in-noise perception. At the same time, Madsen et al. (80) may be an outlier, as a recent meta-analysis revealed that musical training was associated with enhanced abilities to understand speech-in-noise (81). This pattern of results suggests that musician benefits for understanding speech-in-noise may not be related to enhanced auditory stream segregation.” Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: ReviewerResponse_V2.docx https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0274631.r002
1 Sep 2022 Decision Letter - Qian-Jie Fu, Editor The effects of aging and musicianship on the use of auditory streaming cues PONE-D-22-00276R1 Dear Dr. Sauvé, 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, Qian-Jie Fu, Ph.D. Academic Editor PLOS ONE Additional Editor Comments (optional): 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 #1: All comments have been addressed Reviewer #2: All comments have been addressed ******** 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 #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: Yes 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 #1: Yes Reviewer #2: No ****** 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 #1: Yes 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 #1: The authors have taken all my comments into account and I recommend that the manuscript be accepted for publication in PLOSone. One single small typo that I noticed: Line 492: “When then clicked a button to submit their rating, … “ should probably be “When they clicked a button to submit their rating, …” Reviewer #2: The authors have satisfactorily addressed my concerns. Thank you for the opportunity to review this manuscript. ****** 7. 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 ******** https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0274631.r003
Formally Accepted
12 Sep 2022 Acceptance Letter - Qian-Jie Fu, Editor PONE-D-22-00276R1 The effects of aging and musicianship on the use of auditory streaming cues Dear Dr. Sauvé: 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. Qian-Jie Fu Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0274631.r004

Open letter on the publication of peer review reports

PLOS recognizes the benefits of transparency in the peer review process. Therefore, we enable the publication of all of the content of peer review and author responses alongside final, published articles. Reviewers remain anonymous, unless they choose to reveal their names.

We encourage other journals to join us in this initiative. We hope that our action inspires the community, including researchers, research funders, and research institutions, to recognize the benefits of published peer review reports for all parts of the research system.

Learn more at ASAPbio .