PONE-D-22-13033

Understanding others’ distal goals from proximal communicative actions

PLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Dockendorff,

I have received two expert reviews on your paper "Understanding others’ distal goals from proximal communicative actions", which you submitted to PLOS ONE.

As you will see from the reviews attached to the end of this letter, both reviewers found merit in your work, but they also identified a number of issues that need more work. Their comments are nicely detailed and I agree with their assessment. An important issue pointed out by reviewer 1 is whether inferences are truly communicative. Both reviewers also point the need for more details regarding the methods in order to better grasp how participants interpreted actions. Therefore, I invite you to submit a revision together with a cover letter explaining how you have responded to the reviewers’ comments. Should you resubmit a revision, I will send the new version to some or all of the same reviewers.

Sincerely

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We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Cédric A. Bouquet

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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“This research was supported by the European Research Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework Program (FP7/2007-2013) / ERC grant agreement n° [609819], 961 SOMICS”

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“This research was supported by the European Research Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework Program (FP7/2007-2013) / ERC grant agreement n° [609819], SOMICS. We thank Fanni Takátsy for her help with data collection.”

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Please include your amended statements within your cover letter; we will change the online submission form on your behalf.

6. We noted in your submission details that a portion of your manuscript may have been presented or published elsewhere. [A subset of our data (from Experiments 1 and 2) is published in Dockendorff, M., Schmitz, L., Knoblich, G., & Vesper, C. (2021). Understanding distal goals from proximal communicative actions. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (Vol. 43, No. 43).In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (Vol. 43, No. 43)] Please clarify whether this [conference proceeding or publication] was peer-reviewed and formally published. If this work was previously peer-reviewed and published, in the cover letter please provide the reason that this work does not constitute dual publication and should be included in the current manuscript.

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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: No

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 manuscript presents three experiments that test people’s ability to infer distal goals based on how an agent completes a proximal one. Experiment 1 shows that people associate higher velocities with more distant proximal goals, but that people do not use this “iconic” speed-distance association reliably when predicting a distal goal from a proximal one. Experiment 2 then rules out the possibility that this failure is due to an inability to detect differences in velocities over shorter distances, and Experiment 3 shows that people will use the iconic distance-velocity mapping to infer distal goals after having to infer proximal goals based on velocity.

The manuscript tackles an interesting question using a simple and highly-controlled paradigm, and the data help shed light on people’s ability to infer distal goals from proximal ones. At the same time, the claims and conclusions in the manuscript may not always be well justified by the experimental work, and the manuscript would benefit from a major revision before publication.

Major comments:

1. The manuscript is framed as focusing on communicative action, but it is not clear whether the experiment indeed maps onto communicative expectations. While participants are told that the movements they are watching are communicative, it is not clear whether this affects participant inferences in any way (or whether the modulations in the movement match the types of modulations that people would produce were they trying to communicate). In other words, is it possible that you would obtain identical results in a case where participants do not believe the movements are communicative?

To show that the inferences are truly communicative it would be necessary to run a second condition of Experiment 1 where participants are told that the movement was produced by an agent that completed the task in the absence of observers. Alternatively, if the authors are using a different operationalization of communicative (such as anything that reveals information), it would be helpful if this were explained in the introduction. This point should also ideally be returned to in the discussion (particularly given the introduction’s emphasis on SMC as producing intentional communicative modulations).

2. The experiment, while elegant, might also be fairly transparent to participants given the within-subjects aspect of the design. Is it possible that participants do not hold any general intuitions about the relation between velocity and distal goals, but invoke one here because the task transparently reveals that participants are being tested on how to associate speed with goals? To show that this is not the case, it would be ideal to replicate Experiment 1 and ask participants at the end of the task what they thought the experimenters wanted them to do, and how they decided on their strategy. If this is not possible, then it would be helpful if the discussion acknowledged this potential limitation.

3. Related to this, the manuscript would benefit from more details about the experimental procedure of Study 1.

3.1 First, based on our reading of the familiarization procedure, participants saw the slower normal movement for the near target familiarization and the faster normal movement for the far target familiarization (However, there is some ambiguity in the writing as to whether or not this was actually the case). Is it possible that this familiarization phase biased participants towards a pattern of results that associates faster movements with longer distances (or more generally, could this have highlighted an association between speed and goals, increasing the transparency of the task as discussed above)? The methods section would benefit from additional details about the familiarization design. In particular, it would be helpful if the paper clarified whether participants saw the slower normal movement for the near target and the faster normal movement for the far target). Additionally, the Discussion section should ideally acknowledge the possibility of potential biasing effects on participants’ judgements as a potential limitation.

3.2 Second, it would be helpful if the paper included a more detailed explanation regarding the critical distal goal condition in Study 1. In particular, the “teleporting” aspect of the movement introduced in the familiarization could affect what the participants thought of this goal-directed action, and influence the results. This is currently difficult to evaluate because the explanations about the procedure are a bit too high-level. It would be great if the paper could explain the warm-up and procedure in full detail, including the rationale behind the teleporting component and what the authors intended when designing this condition.

Intuitively, it seemed as though the teleporting aspect was an intentional choice to obscure the relationship between velocity and distance for the distal goal. However, several phrases in the manuscript assume that there was an obvious connection between velocity and distance for the distal goal (e.g., “Taken together, the results of the two experiments raise the possibility that some participants in the Distal goal condition in Experiment 1 might not have been aware of the underlying motor iconic relation between the proximal movement and the distal goal”). Critically, the manuscript raises questions in the Discussion about how participants understood this action sequence, making the choice for teleportation as the second action somewhat unclear. It would be helpful to clarify for readers why the authors chose an unfamiliar second action (i.e., teleportation) for inclusion in this task.

3.3 More generally, the Methods section does not include the directions used to introduce the task to participants, and this makes it difficult to understand how participants might think that the distal goal would shape the proximal goal-directed actions. Were participants given any indication that this was actually how the movement occured (i.e., the demonstrator moved the box to the proximal goal, paused, and then the box teleported itself to the distal goal)? Or were they told that they would not see all of the demonstrator’s movements (i.e. the pausing and subsequent teleporting were alterations to the real movement meant to obscure a more continuous trajectory)?

3.4 Similarly, a more detailed explanation would be helpful when introducing the prediction that participants would have an underlying motor-iconic relation between the proximal movement and the distal goal. Specifically, if participants are not familiar with the type of action used to accomplish a distal goal, why should we predict that they would be able to simulate or guess the “backwards effects” that the distal goal would have on the manner of movement used to achieve the proximal goal? You could imagine a parallel task in which participants are told that they are going to see someone reach for a pencil and then they’ll either dax or blick; and that their task is to predict whether the person will dax or blick. In this hypothetical task, participants would have no familiarity with the distal goal and would be forced to make a best guess based on whatever arbitrary cues are available and therefore it would be inaccurate to say that the participants are interpreting proximal actions in terms of their distal goal. Is it possible that the task in this paper reflects the same process as this thought experiment?

4. Throughout the manuscript, the authors explore the idea that movement modulations might be best thought of as a kind of iconicity in which features of the action represent its goal. However, the relationship between speed and distance might be better conceptualized as indexical, rather than iconic. An indexical sign is caused by what it signifies (e.g., smoke signals fire), whereas an iconic sign resembles what it signifies. Since there is a lawful relationship between the velocity and distance of natural movements, it feels more consistent to view the relationship between distance and velocity as causal, therefore making velocity an indexical sign for distance.

This distinction may be important, because indexical signs are not necessarily communicative (simply doing the action would generate a certain pattern of velocities, which could explain the pattern of results in Study 1’s proximal condition without reference to communication).

The indexical vs. iconic distinction might also be important in relation to the findings in the distal goal condition in Study 1. The unfamiliar movement dynamics (due to the teleportation) in the distal goal could remove the indexical nature of the velocity-distance relationship for participants, inviting truly iconic interpretation. Critically, however, it seems as though either interpretation in the distal condition (fast-far or slow-far) is consistent with an iconic interpretation (slow speed and longer distance doesn’t seem like an impossible connection to draw). It would be helpful if the authors discussed the nature of iconicity in this task more thoroughly and considered whether referring to the relationship as indexical might be more appropriate in some cases.

5. The goal of Study 3 and its implications are a bit difficult to follow. This is in part because the manuscript appears to assume that participants should understand how the distal goal would shape proximal actions (in a manner parallel to the football example provided in the introduction). But it is not clear how participants thought about the teleportation component of the task. To make this interpretation, wouldn’t you need to show that people retain the natural relationship between speed and distance in this task?

Moreover, the indexical vs. iconic distinction may be relevant here. Under the interpretation offered in point 4 above, highlighting indexical relationships in the proximal goal phase of Study 3 could impact subsequent iconic interpretation in the distal goal phase, but arbitrarily choosing the “wrong” iconic interpretation in the distal goal phase would not undermine later indexical interpretation in the proximal goal phase, since the velocity-distance relationship is seen as causal.

Minor comments:

-Ln 35-37: Upon first read, the sentence sounds like physical distance was manipulated (i.e., increasing the separation between distal and proximal). Consider saying instead that adding a distal goal led to more variation in mapping.

-Ln 40-42: The final sentence of the abstract reads as if the paper will include data on modulation production. Consider changing the wording to make it clearer that the paper’s contribution is about how people interpret/use modulations.

-Ln 92-93: The initial definition of distal goals was a bit difficult to follow. While the concept becomes clearer throughout the paper, this preliminary definition could benefit from clarification. In a sense, the proximal goal condition also asks about a goal that goes beyond the observed action since the final goal is occluded and the observed action is only part of the trajectory.

-Ln 214-222: When laying out these predictions, the authors do not mention distal goals specifically. It would be good to make explicit that the authors do not predict any differences between the distal and proximal goal here.

-Ln 298: The data preparation section would be easier to follow if it came after the procedure.

-Ln 321-322: Did participants see the slower normal movement for the near target and the faster normal movement for the far target?

-Study 1 Results: The concepts of mapping and consistency were difficult to follow. Please consider extending the explanation at the beginning of the results section to better explain and contextualize these two measures (e.g., a score of 12 would mean x but a score of -12 would mean y).

-Figures 6 and 7: These figures are difficult to read. Please consider revising the titles of each column.

-It would be helpful to have the warm-up videos and the verbatim task instructions available on OSF.

Reviewer #2: Abstract

Experiments aimed at examining if observers can derive information about distal goals by relying on kinematic modulations of  an actor’s instrumental actions. They designed a paradigm in which participants observed a box moving and had to guess the final location of the box (near vs. Far). Participants were randomly assigned to two distincts conditions (Proximal vs. Distal). Authors manipulated the velocity of the movement of box and expected that this modulation impact the decision of the participants about the final destination of the box.

They conducted three experiment in order to show that 1) participants used movement velocity to choose the final location of the box in both proximal and distal condition (Experiment 1), 2) participants were able to discriminate between “slow” and “fast” movements (Experiment 2), 3) participants used motor-iconic association depending the repetition between “proximal” and “distal” conditions (Experiment 3).

Generally, I think that the paper is well written and the experiments are also well conducted. I have some small concerns about the way authors had framed their research and discuss and interpreted their results.

But I think that my comments below could be address with a minor revision.

Main comments

a. I was wondering why the authors decided to focus only temporal aspect of the movement (i.e. velocity) ? The same team already showed that spatial parameter (i.e., amplitude of the movement is altered during action performing during joint action (e.g., Vesper et al., 2016).

Moreover the design of the experiments allow the authors to test such parameters. It might be interesting to discuss it.

b. Auhors based their prediction on literature on velocity for single movement (e.g., ref 23 in their paper). However, the distal condition is comparable to an action sequence with a stationary position (see 33 l.739). It might be interesting that authors further discuss this part. I recommend that the authors might pay more attention to their data in the distal condition. They reported huge variability for the mapping score for each movement condition. As they also not observed such variability for the consistency score, is it possible that there is different motor-iconic interpretation within their participants ? If it the case how interpret this phenomenon ?

I would suggest that authors pay attention to how participants might infered the weight of the box. For instance, is it possible that participants interpreted the first movement as a resting state before performing the other movement. As is it a sequence small effort for the first movement and then large effort for the second ?

Additional experience (not mandatory)

I was wondering what would participants actually do if they had to move the box in the distal condition. How participants would move an object to the point A ? Both movements will present the same Kinematic ? Authors would assumed that the movement would not be the same ?

Analisys

Authors reported variability in the motor iconic relation for the distal condition. Are the same participants that use an non motor iconic relation across the conditions/trials in the distal condition of the first experiment ?

Minor comments

Experiment 1 - I recommend to switch procedure section before data preparation section

Analysis - I recommend authors to further explain what we could interpreted with their dependant variables.

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

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Understanding others’ distal goals from proximal communicative actions

PONE-D-22-13033R1

Dear Dr. Dockendorff,

I am 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.

With kind regards,

Cédric A. Bouquet

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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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

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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 #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 revision addresses my previous concerns. I appreciate the authors’ careful inclusion of additional explanations and caveats as requested and I recommend accepting the article for publication.

Reviewer #2: I think that the authors did a great job. I don't have any major comments. I think that the paper is ready to go.

Best regards

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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

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