PONE-D-22-10991Re-assessing the role of culture on the visual orientation perception of the rod and frame testPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Willey,

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.

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We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

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Alastair Smith

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 If you have cited papers that have been retracted, please include the rationale for doing so in the manuscript text, or remove these references and replace them with relevant current references.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 If you need to cite a retracted article, indicate the article’s retracted status in the References list and also include a citation and full reference for the retraction notice.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. 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: Partly

Reviewer #2: Partly

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

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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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: Yes

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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 study addressed cross-cultural differences in perception, specifically in visual perception, by using a visuospatial task that assesses the person's ability to align a rod to true vertical (gravity) or identify the direction of the rod when surrounded by a distracting tilted frame. The manuscript is generally well written, but there are a few concerns.

1. The authors can still enrich their Introduction with information on how culture influences attentional processes (direct attention to focal objects or contexts), and on the type of processing (analytical or holistic) different cultures prefer.

2. In the Results section, when referring to "Others", it would be useful to include what is meant by that. It is not certain whether the authors included this information in the included appendix of the questionnaire.

3. Also for "Others", it would make it easier for the reader if the gender distribution is specified for this group as well at each analysis trial.

4. For generational data, it is not clear how long the 1st generation Americans or the non-US citizens have been in the USA. It is possible that the time of their stay may influence the extent to which they were affected by the culture they are exposed to.

5. Line 223: it is not clear what is meant by " and interestingly since it was in the "wrong" direction of ethnicity".

6. Lines 239, 240. This is a run-on sentence.

7. The figures are not numbered. They should be.

8. In the figure on generation effects (I assume it is Figure 8), the authors should include number of subjects (n).

9. It would be worth adding how sex hormones influence performance on visuospatial tasks either in the Introduction or Discussion to delineate any gender effects.

Reviewer #2: This is a short and interesting study but some elements, which are overall minor in my opinion, should be improved before it can get published. Below are my point-by-point comments about the paper.

Line 83. Is there a justification for using a 3D version of the RFT here? Is it because it may increase the effect size and therefore be more sensitive to detect cultural variations?

Line 83. How is culture operationalised and tested? Is culture tested in different countries? (one discovers that this is not the case when reading the paper, but this should be prepared). Is there a justification/good reason for testing culture only within the US? One may refer to studies which found that cultural effects are smaller/decrease for Asians living in the US, or Amercians living in Asia (e.g., Kitayama,Duffy,Kawamura, and Larsen, 2003)

Line 84. The meaning of "to anticipate" here is difficult to grasp. I had to read the sentence twice to understand its meaning. It was not clear to me, at first, that this was a preview of all the findings of the study.

Line 111. Lack of clarity, the sentence suggests that there were three conditions (-18°, 0°, 18°), with 6 trials each. Is this correct? If yes, could this be said explicitly?

Line 158. A description of how culture is defined, in subsequent analyses, would be useful. In addition, given that culture is the main IV in this study, it is important to provide specific information about the questions asked to the participants in order to classify them.

Line 166. Who are the 137 participants who do not identify as EA or Caucasian? How is Caucasian actually defined? Does it mean white skin? What about participants of mixed origins, are they other? We are given little information about the main IV of the study, and this is problematic.

Line 179. Does Ethnicity only have two levels? What about the 'other' group shown on the graphs? What does it mean exactly?

Line 190. Although the main effect of ethnicity is not significant, there may be a trend there. Same comment as below.

Line 195. The main effect of Frame suggests that overall performance varied across males and females. Were RTs measured, in ordre to check for possible engagement effects? (i.e., longer RTs, coupled with better overall performance and lower illusion size?)

Line206. How is a second generaion Asian defined? Is it enough to have one (out of 4) grandparents of Asian decent to be considered a 2nd-generation Asian?

Line 314. This conclusion is somewhat surprising. A number of analyses suggest that the performance of the two cultural groups differ. In fact, there is no strong evidence for an absence of difference. the fact that the difference does not go in the direction predicted by what is called the 'culture theory' (making it sound as though there is only one possible account for cultural effects), does not necessarily mean that there is no effect. Rather, it may mean that if the effect shown here actually exists (and one cannot really decide one way or another), it cannot be accounted for by the social organisation theory.

Line 373. The discussion feels short, with no attempt to account for the cultural effect observed in the study, and little discussion about the gender effect observed.

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

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PONE-D-22-10991R1Re-assessing the role of culture on the visual orientation perception of the rod and frame testPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Liu,

Thank you for submitting your revised manuscript to PLOS ONE. Both reviewers are satisfied that their comments have been addressed, although you will see that Reviewer #1 has a couple of remaining points that are worth considering. I would like to invite you to address these in a minor revision. If I am satisfied that they have been appropriately handled then we may not require another round of reviews (although, of course, this cannot be guaranteed).

Please submit your revised manuscript by Nov 12 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,

Alastair D. Smith

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Journal Requirements:

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.

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

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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 #1: Partly

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: Yes

**********

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 addressed my previous comments, but I have a few more for this revised manuscript.

Overall, I feel that cultural studies should include participants within their cultural habitat for comparisons sake, rather than including participants of different generations in a country different than their own. Having said that, this is no implication to the significance of this study.

1. In the updated abstract, please use "white Western Europeans", rather than "white" participants, because at this point of the manuscript, the term has not been defined yet.

2. Page 5, lines 89-90: Please put the reference [9] after the 2D computerized test, not in line 90 citation [9, 10].

3. I feel that the authors included too many comments and even reference citations in the Results sections (3.1.1 SV Bias; 3.2.3 Generational Data); it is better to just report the findings in the Results section, and then leave the explanations for the Discussion section.

4. Why is the number of participants for Generational Data different in 3.1.2 and 3.2.3?

5. The authors state that they cannot offer an explanation for their paradoxical findings which contradicted their hypothesis and those from a previous study [Reference 6] that reported that East Asians were more prone to larger errors on the RFT, in comparison to their Western counterparts. Unexpectedly, other results also indicate that later generation Americans, which are quite immersed in American culture, displayed greater biases than the 1st generation Americans or non-citizens.

Whether methodology differences might have affected the results, specifically the RFT protocol, is not clear. Unlike Reference 6, participants in this study stood on a foam block while aligning the rod to vertical. This might be worth looking into.

Reviewer #2: I find that the revised version of the manuscript adequately addresses all the issues raised during the review.

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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

**********

[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.

Re-assessing the role of culture on the visual orientation perception of the rod and frame test

PONE-D-22-10991R2

Dear Dr. Liu,

Thank you for submitting your revised manuscript. I am satisfied that the amendments you made adequately address the final comments and am, therefore, pleased to formally accept your submission 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.

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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.

With kind regards,

Alastair D. Smith

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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