PONE-D-23-34024Effects of Acute Stress on Biological Motion PerceptionPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Yu,

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.

 Reviewers found value in the work but they raised several concerns that deserve to be carefully considered. In particular, both of them highlighted the need for a more clear presentation of the results, also from the point of view of figure production. Attention shoudl be devoted also in improving readability and soundness.

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Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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 [Humanities and Social Sciences Projects Funded by the Ministry of Education and the Scientific Research Project of Hubei Provincial Department of Education, China (Grant No. Q20221313)].  

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Additional Editor Comments (if provided):

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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: 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: 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: No

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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 concept of this study is interesting, but presentation of results is unclear. It would be better to explain the neural origin of each component (P1, P2, N330, especially LPP) and the significance of activity from each region (PO3, O1, POz, O2, PO4 for P1; P3 to P6 for P2; Fz and F1 for N330; CPz, CP1, and CP2 for LPP, also why the regions were selected) in the introduction, and then state what the authors wanted to clarify in this study. Grand average works well for checking the overall waveform, but is not suitable for statistical comparisons of each component. The amplitude and latency of each component of the ERP should be described by a box-and-whisker or bar graph. Since there appears to be more difference in amplitude than in latency for P1, the mean and standard deviation should be plotted to clarify the difference. In the results, the authors should explain why there is a difference between P3 and P5 sites in the peak amplitude of P2 component, and should also state what the difference means. Similarly, describe the behavioral data using figures.

The comparison of motion characteristic especially between “Global” and “Local” may have been influenced more by confusability than by the amount of information; if the Local figure were also placed so that the figure was centered rather than up and down, it would not be equivalent, but the confusability could be closer to that of the whole body. This is just a comment and please consider that next time. P1 should discuss which site caused the difference in latency and what its significance is. Since P1Peak is expressed at each site, we should discuss what this component indicates.

Minor comments

L239-240 It says that there is a significant difference in post-hoc P1 peak latency, but does not indicate which site.

Figure Legend does not indicate which the region is indicated.

Reviewer #2: The manuscript explores the impact of acute psychological stress on the perception of biological motion and investigates attention as a mediating factor for these effects. The researchers conducted an electrophysiological study to measure evoked responses during a 'bright moving dot' visual scene under conditions of induced stress.

This study is intriguing, but the manuscript is challenging to follow, largely due to problems with the English language.

These points are indicated below:

Line. 42, Rephrase the sentence. > “In the current study, we examined the effects of acute psychological stress on the perceptual processing of biological motion and attention as a mechanism of these effects”

Line 45, Two sentences redundant: “Acute stress can be induced by the improved Montreal Imaging Stress Task (MIST) [7]. The improved MIST task uses multiplication to induce acute stress.”

Line 67 Please rephrase “ In this study, the dynamic sequence diagram of biological light spots was used to study biological motion perception ability”

The volunteer college students, did they receive credit, or money?

“Inversion effect” is not clearly described

Line 150 please rephrase “The mental arithmetic items in the formal experiment (10 trials) were different from those in the formal experiment”.

Line 166, please modify the sentence “In the formal experiment, the red arrow will not be marked.”

Line 186, please rephrase “The length and bad interval free for ICA interval were both 50 s.”

Figure legends are not descriptive enough, they should be more comprehensive. This makes the figures hard to decipher.

Line 465, There needs a better explanation than the current for LPP: “We can conclude that inhibition persistence was longer in the global upright and local inverted walking conditions than in the local upright and global inverted walking conditions.”

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: Yes: Prof. Dr. Murat Özgören, MD PhD

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Effects of acute stress on biological motion perception

PONE-D-23-34024R1

Dear Dr. Yu,

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.

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Kind regards,

Alessandro Mengarelli

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

All the Reviewers' concerns have been addressed in a proper way, and the paper is suitable for being published in its present form.

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

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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. 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: Thank you for replying to my comments. The addition of the figure clarifies the difference. Very nice work. I have no further comments.

Reviewer #2: Even though the English is hard to follow the ms has improved substantially. The authors responded to the reviwers comments.

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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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