PONE-D-23-19620Registered report: Age-preserved semantic memory and the CRUNCH effect manifested as differential semantic control networks: an fMRI studyPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Haitas,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. As you know, the key purpose of Stage 2 Registered Report review is to verify that the registered protocol was followed, that any deviations from the protocol are clearly reported and explained, and that the conclusions are supported by the data. I have now received reviews from two experts in the field (one of them had also reviewed your original protocol submission) and both of the reviewers feel that you generally followed the protocol. Reviewer 2 identified two key conclusions that do not seem to follow from the data and noted some (minor) protocol deviations and exploratory (not pre-registered) analyses that were not clearly identified as exploratory. Reviewer 1 also had some concerns that can be addressed through clarification/revision. Their recommendations are quite clear and constructive, so I believe they should be straight-forward to address in a revision.

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Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Does the manuscript adhere to the experimental procedures and analyses described in the Registered Report Protocol?

If the manuscript reports any deviations from the planned experimental procedures and analyses, those must be reasonable and adequately justified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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2. If the manuscript reports exploratory analyses or experimental procedures not outlined in the original Registered Report Protocol, are these reasonable, justified and methodologically sound?

A Registered Report may include valid exploratory analyses not previously outlined in the Registered Report Protocol, as long as they are described as such.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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3. Are the conclusions supported by the data and do they address the research question presented in the Registered Report Protocol?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the research question(s) outlined in the Registered Report Protocol and on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: No

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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

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6. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: I was a reviewer of this article at the proposal phase. The study aims at investigating age-related differences in semantic memory versus semantic control under the CRUCNH framework. Participants performed a semantic decision task where a target item had to be linked to one of two options. Task difficulty is varied by manipulating the semantic distance between the target word and the options. Despite the predictions of CRUNCH, the results did not show differential brain activation across groups as a function of task demands (i.e., increasing brain activity with increasing task demands for younger adults, but a decline (or plateauing) of brain activity with increasing task demands for older adults).

I think this paper is based on some solid experimental design and control, and that the results would be of great interest to the researchers in the field. I particularly liked the perceived vs. actual (manipulated) difficulty as it takes care of a whole host of confounding lexical variables that could have potentially affected the results (e.g., frequency, phonological similarity, orthographic similarity, etc.).

I have a couple of minor concerns that I encourage the authors to discuss in a revised version, and a couple of suggestions that the authors might want to consider either in the current manuscript or in future research.

Concerns:

1. It is difficult to know what the participants base their decisions on during the semantic judgement task. Do they consider features such as size, color, texture, animacy, concreteness etc.? Importantly, it is possible that the “high demand” condition is (perceived to be) more difficulty simply because there are more variables that can go into the judgement (e.g. semantic relatedness + size, color, texture ...). I think a discussion of this concern would be helpful for the reader.

2. On page 34, the authors say: “Based on the above pilot data, we were able to confirm that our task generated an effect of task demands that impacted task performance (accuracy and RTs) differently in younger and older adults, in the expected directions”. This is a little misleading because they did not find an Age:Task Demand interaction. They do see differential impacts of task on accuracy vs. RTs, with accuracy being equal across groups, but RTs being significantly longer for older adults. But this sentence is phrased in a way that implies the existence of an Age:Task Demand interaction, which is not true.

Suggestions:

1. Currently, the authors manipulate semantic distance using a norming study. Another (maybe more powerful way) would be to use tools such as GloVe (Global Vectors) for word representations (Pennington et al., 2014) to compute semantic similarity between the pairs in each triad. The vector representations in GloVe (and other similar NLP tools) are calculated based on really large corpora and may therefore offer more valid/stable distance values.

2. The semantic similarity is one way of varying task difficulty, but another way to look at the data is to use RTs themselves as a measure of task difficulty. Although RTs are the dependent variable, and the conditions probably correlate with RTs, there might still be variations in brain activity that is explained by RTs, but not by task demands. This is because there might still be quite a bit of variation within each demand condition. RTs can be viewed as an index for “actually experienced” difficulty, with longer RTs denoting more difficulty. One can then use this new variable (either categorical or continuous) as a predictor of brain activity. I wonder if the results would change when analyzed this way.

Typos:

Page 13: “should to” --> “should”

Page 63: “said” --> “set”?

Reviewer #2: Protocols in the Stage 1 protocol have been followed. However, I have some major concerns about how the results are summarised in the Discussion (see the last two comments below).

The method states that behavioural data were analysed with mixed-effects models and not repeated-measures ANOVA as stated in the Stage 1 protocol. However, the results reported seem to follow the Stage 1 approach. I suggest returning the Methods text to original pre-registered protocol.

I suggest reporting mean RTs and untransformed accuracies for each of the four conditions, given the importance of these data for the interpretation of study results.

fMRI analyses: no information about the thresholding approach was given in the Stage 1 protocol, which is unfortunate but cannot now be corrected. The thresholding approach used is reasonable but alpha should reported (i.e., is it p<0.05 with correction for multiple comparisons?).

What are the direction of the effects in Figure 8? Are the age effects voxels that were more active in old people or in young people? The condition effects – are these voxels that were more active for the semantic task or the control task? I ask because the activated areas don’t look quite like typical semantic regions.

What do the numbers in Table 8 represent? Are the estimated means for the effects of semantic vs. control task? A more informative caption is needed here, and in Table 9.

The timeout analyses were not pre-registered. They should be labelled as exploratory and some rationale given for them.

Pg. 62 “the semantic memory task was successful at… (2) demonstrating age-invariant behavioral performance by the older group (i.e., maintained in comparison with the younger adults’ performance), as required to test the CRUNCH model."

This is at odds with the author’s own predictions on page 23, where they predict that young people would be more accurate than young people (at least in the high demand condition). Some explanation is needed here – if parity in accuracy was needed to test the CRUNCH model, why did they design a study where they expected young people to be more accurate?

Pg. 62-63. Most of the regions described as semantic here are not activated in Figure 8 (i.e., posterior inferior parietal cortex, lateral temporal cortex, ventromedial prefrontal cortex and posterior cingulate gyrus). Nor are the ATLs. To suggest that these areas are activated in their study is highly misleading. At best they have some IFG and dmPFC, plus some posterior ventral temporal around the visual wordform area. A semantic network this is not.

Pg 63 “In the pars triangularis and the pars orbitalis, lower activity was observed for the high-demand level versus the low-demand level. This demonstrates the task demand effect in these regions.” This is very worrying because there should be *higher* activity in the high-demand condition here, not lower. Either this is a major typo or the experiment has delivered the opposite results to what we’d expect from the semantic control literature (as reviewed in detail in the next paragraph!). This needs to be addressed.

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

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Registered report: Age-preserved semantic memory and the CRUNCH effect manifested as differential semantic control networks: an fMRI study

PONE-D-23-19620R1

Dear Dr. Haitas,

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.

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Kind regards,

Daniel Mirman

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Journal Comments:

Please ensure that your final submission explicitly references your previously published protocol ("Age-preserved semantic memory and the CRUNCH effect manifested as differential semantic control networks: An fMRI study"), including the doi, in the references section.

Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Does the manuscript adhere to the experimental procedures and analyses described in the Registered Report Protocol?

If the manuscript reports any deviations from the planned experimental procedures and analyses, those must be reasonable and adequately justified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

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2. If the manuscript reports exploratory analyses or experimental procedures not outlined in the original Registered Report Protocol, are these reasonable, justified and methodologically sound?

A Registered Report may include valid exploratory analyses not previously outlined in the Registered Report Protocol, as long as they are described as such.

Reviewer #1: Yes

**********

3. Are the conclusions supported by the data and do they address the research question presented in the Registered Report Protocol?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the research question(s) outlined in the Registered Report Protocol and on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: 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

**********

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

**********

6. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: I read the responses to my remaining concerns, and I'm convinced by them. I think this paper makes meaningful contributions to the field.

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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

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