Peer Review History

Original SubmissionJuly 6, 2022
Decision Letter - Silva Ibrahimi, Editor

PONE-D-22-19099The creative interplay between hand gestures, convergent thinking, and mental imageryPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Hyusein,

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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After a careful evaluation of two reviewers and in a full respect for any minor concerns that might have emerged during the revision,particularly regarding the comments of reviewer 1 ,please take into consideration these two minor revisions :1. Make a more comprehensive line with  shortening sentences and/or consider revising it (last paragraph, page 7,line 195);2. Please clarify the discrepancy between the sample written in the abstract section and those who are revealed in the results section (line 415);there is an unclear procedure between the 78 and/or 80 tested  participants. Please give an explanation if there were any changes  during the collection of the final valid number of participants.3. Please also consider to give a better resolution of the figures and identify the vertical axis and plotted scores in order to make them clearer for the public reader.Please note that I have also acted as a reviewer for your work under "Reviewer 2" comments. Both reviewers have found your work really interesting and recommended a positive evaluation based on the overall structure and scientific operationalization on the whole work,but,you are pleased to consider and revise the above concerns in order to have a ready-to-publish article at the most convenient time.You are pleased to submit your revised manuscript by 8th November 2022. 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.

We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Dr. Silva Ibrahimi, PhD

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.

Additional Editor Comments (if provided):

[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

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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: The target paper presents and discusses the results of one study aiming to clarify the relationship between hand gestures, mental imagery, and convergent thinking. The study is timely and of relevance for, even thought several papers disclose a relation between hand gesturing and divergent thinking, no study to date extended these findings to convergent thinking.

Overall, the manuscript is well written and clear. The state of the art is particularly clear and thorough, but also straightforward in clarifying the hypothesis and its rational. The design of the study is clever (particularly on the manipulation of the variables both within and between subjects), the analyses appropriate and the results clear.

For all the above, I endorse this manuscript to be published. I have but a few minor points and suggestions.

1. The first sentence in the last paragraph on page 7 (staring on line 195) is a bit awkward to read and tries to squeeze information which would be easier to follow if presented in two or three separate sentences.

2. First paragraph of the results section (line 415). This information would most naturally fit in the participants section. Also, it goes against what is stated in that section, which reads "Therefore, the data of 80 participants were included in the final analysis". Likewise, shouldn't the abstract read that 78, instead of 80, participants were tested?

3. The figures seemed to me to be of low quality. Also, it would be preferable if the vertical axis specified, in each image, what score is being plotted (as they are, all images just read "score" and the reader has to refer to the caption or the legend). Finally, the labels of the plots (A and B) should be presented in the top left corner of each plot, instead of in the bottom left corner.

Reviewer #2: This is a very interesting research! Although the efforts to study the dynamics of convergent thinking are known in literature,the present study gives a fresh and comprehensive value in determining associations and potential linkage between gesticulation,mental representation and mental imagery. Further research areas are also properly addressed as the present work is a country located-focused.

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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: Yes: Nuno De Sá Teixeira

Reviewer #2: No

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[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.

Revision 1

Response to Reviewers

Reviewer 1: The target paper presents and discusses the results of one study aiming to clarify the relationship between hand gestures, mental imagery, and convergent thinking. The study is timely and of relevance for, even though several papers disclose a relation between hand gesturing and divergent thinking, no study to date extended these findings to convergent thinking.

Overall, the manuscript is well written and clear. The state of the art is particularly clear and thorough, but also straightforward in clarifying the hypothesis and its rational. The design of the study is clever (particularly on the manipulation of the variables both within and between subjects), the analyses appropriate and the results clear.

For all the above, I endorse this manuscript to be published. I have but a few minor points and suggestions.

Response: We thank the reviewer for their positive feedback and helpful comments on the paper.

Reviewer 1: The first sentence in the last paragraph on page 7 (staring on line 195) is a bit awkward to read and tries to squeeze information which would be easier to follow if presented in two or three separate sentences.

Response: We have revised the sentence by splitting it into two separate sentences and paraphrasing it as follows: “There have not been any studies investigating gestures’ effects on convergent thinking. However, research has shown that fluid arm movements, squeezing a ball, or enacting metaphors with hands could improve convergent thinking [1, 2, 46, 47].”

Reviewer 1: First paragraph of the results section (line 415). This information would most naturally fit in the participants section. Also, it goes against what is stated in that section, which reads "Therefore, the data of 80 participants were included in the final analysis". Likewise, shouldn't the abstract read that 78, instead of 80, participants were tested?

Response: We have moved the first paragraph of the Results section to the Participants subsection of the Method section (p.12, line 321) explaining the reason for the discrepancy in the two sample sizes. We have also included the descriptive statistics (mean age, standard deviation, and the number of females) of the RAT sample. The newly added paragraph is as follows:

“For the RAT analyses, two participants were later excluded because one of them was not shown the RAT triads on the screen, but the experimenter only read them out loud; and the second one was excluded because they were an outlier due to previous research familiarity with the task. Thus, our final sample consisted of 78 participants (Mage = 21.3, SD = 2.47; 50 females) for the RAT analyses and 80 participants (Mage = 21.3, SD = 2.46; 52 females) for the vRAT analyses.”We have also removed the number of the sample size from the abstract, so it is not confusing to the reader:

“We tested young adults on verbal and visual convergent thinking, controlling for their mental imagery skills.”

Reviewer 1: The figures seemed to me to be of low quality. Also, it would be preferable if the vertical axis specified, in each image, what score is being plotted (as they are, all images just read "score" and the reader has to refer to the caption or the legend). Finally, the labels of the plots (A and B) should be presented in the top left corner of each plot, instead of in the bottom left corner.

Response: We have replaced the initial figures with higher-quality ones. We have changed the names of the vertical axes from “Score” to “RAT Score Predicted Probabilities.” Labels (A and B) have been moved to the upper left corners. We have replaced the grey background and grid lines with a white background to make the slopes easier to read. We have changed the acronyms (GS1, GE1, and GE2) in the graphs with the full names of the groups and conditions since the space allows, and again, it makes the graphs easier to read and grasp. Finally, we removed the acronyms from the captions as they are no longer needed.

Reviewer 2: This is a very interesting research! Although the efforts to study the dynamics of convergent thinking are known in literature, the present study gives a fresh and comprehensive value in determining associations and potential linkage between gesticulation, mental representation and mental imagery. Further research areas are also properly addressed as the present work is a country located-focused.

Response: We thank the reviewer for their thoughtful and encouraging comments.

Attachments
Attachment
Submitted filename: Response to Reviewers.docx
Decision Letter - Silva Ibrahimi, Editor

PONE-D-22-19099R1The creative interplay between hand gestures, convergent thinking, and mental imageryPLOS ONE

Dear 

Dear Dr. Hyusein,

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.

Your revised work has generally addressed all the previous suggestions and recommendations; it is well-structured and technically sound. The only concern to kindly be considered by you and in respecting our valuable reviewer's opinion regards the suggestions of Reviewer 3 to cite some more works within the micro-gesture recognition analysis. You can find the reviewer's suggestion below.

Please kindly consider addressing the suggestion  by Mar 24 2023 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.

We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Silva Ibrahimi, PhD

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.

[Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.]

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 #3: 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 #3: Yes

**********

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

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #3: 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 #3: 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 #3: 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 adequately addressed all my comments and the manuscript is considerably improved. In particular, the new figures are much easier to read and more clearly convey the found outcomes.

Reviewer #3: The authors kindly revised the papers according to the comments. Some gesture recognition related papers should be cited.

[1] X. Liu, H. Shi, H. Chen, Z. Yu, X. Li, and G. Zhao. “iMiGUE: An Identity-free Video Dataset for Micro-Gesture Understanding and Emotion Analysis,” IEEE/CVF conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, pp. 10631-10642, 2021.

[2] X. Liu, H. Shi, X. Hong, H. Chen, D. Tao, and G. Zhao “3D Skeletal Gesture Recognition via Hidden States Exploration,” IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, Vol. 29, pp. 4583–4597,2020.

[3] Z. Yu, B. Zhou, J. Wan, P. Wang, H. Chen, X. Liu, S. Li, and G. Zhao. “Searching Multi-Rate and Multi-Modal Temporal Enhanced Networks for Gesture Recognition,” IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 2021.

[4] X. Liu and G. Zhao, “3D Skeletal Gesture Recognition using Sparse Coding of Time-Warping Invariant Riemannian Trajectories,” IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, Vol. 23, pp. 1841–1854, 2021.

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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: Yes: Nuno Alexandre De Sá Teixeira

Reviewer #3: 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.

Revision 2

Response to Reviewers

Reviewer 1: The authors adequately addressed all my comments and the manuscript is considerably improved. In particular, the new figures are much easier to read and more clearly convey the found outcomes.

Response: We thank the reviewer for their original comment and also believe that their suggestion has improved the quality of the figures and the paper overall.

Reviewer 3: The authors kindly revised the papers according to the comments. Some gesture recognition related papers should be cited.

[1] X. Liu, H. Shi, H. Chen, Z. Yu, X. Li, and G. Zhao. “iMiGUE: An Identity-free Video Dataset for Micro-Gesture Understanding and Emotion Analysis,” IEEE/CVF conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, pp. 10631-10642, 2021.

[2] X. Liu, H. Shi, X. Hong, H. Chen, D. Tao, and G. Zhao “3D Skeletal Gesture Recognition via Hidden States Exploration,” IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, Vol. 29, pp. 4583–4597,2020.

[3] Z. Yu, B. Zhou, J. Wan, P. Wang, H. Chen, X. Liu, S. Li, and G. Zhao. “Searching Multi-Rate and Multi-Modal Temporal Enhanced Networks for Gesture Recognition,” IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 2021.

[4] X. Liu and G. Zhao, “3D Skeletal Gesture Recognition using Sparse Coding of Time-Warping Invariant Riemannian Trajectories,” IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, Vol. 23, pp. 1841–1854, 2021.

Response: We thank the reviewer for their suggested readings. We addressed them in an additional paragraph that we included in the Discussion section (line 808-822) and updated the reference list accordingly (line 1076-1093). As the suggested papers were not very relevant to our claims, we did not go into much detail when discussing them.

The newly added paragraph is as follows: “Last, one of the main challenges both in creativity assessment and gesture coding can be achieving high interrater reliability, mainly due to subjectivity in human ratings. Although convergent thinking measurement is immune to human bias because correct responses are usually predetermined, classical divergent thinking measures, such as the AUT, are prone to rater subjectivity. These limitations are currently being addressed by automation of creativity assessment with computational methods that use natural language processing [89, 90]. Moreover, newly emerging technological improvements, such as machine-learning algorithms also offer a solution to the challenges in gesture coding (e.g., recently proposed state-of-the-art gesture recognition methods [91-94]). Even though these studies used large datasets to train their models, there is still a big diversity in how people use their gestures, which makes it difficult to train machines to detect and classify gestures. Alternatively, human raters benefit from other verbal and nonverbal cues, such as speech, prosody, and facial expressions, to identify and classify hand gestures. Even if training machines for gesture recognition could be an arduous task, it is a promising path for valuable interdisciplinary work between the fields of psycholinguistics and computer sciences.”

Attachments
Attachment
Submitted filename: Response to Reviewers.docx
Decision Letter - Silva Ibrahimi, Editor

The creative interplay between hand gestures, convergent thinking, and mental imagery

PONE-D-22-19099R2

Dear Author,

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,

Silva Ibrahimi, PhD

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 #3: 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 #3: Yes

**********

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

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #3: 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 #3: 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 #3: 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 addressed all remaining issues and I reckon the manuscript is now ready to be accepted for publication

Reviewer #3: No further comments. The authors have effectively addressed all my concerns and I recommend accepting the manuscript.

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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: Yes: Nuno Alexandre De Sá Teixeira

Reviewer #3: No

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Formally Accepted
Acceptance Letter - Silva Ibrahimi, Editor

PONE-D-22-19099R2

The creative interplay between hand gestures, convergent thinking, and mental imagery

Dear Dr. Hyusein:

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. Silva Ibrahimi

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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