PONE-D-25-10199More efficient gaze behavior in relation to expertise during tactical decision-making in volleyballPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Kanatschnig,

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Additional Editor Comments:

Dear authors

The reviewers have suggested significant revisions to your paper before it can be considered further. I specifically recommend you address the methodological issues highlighted by both thoroughly, as for me they still offer a consideration of whether your work should be sent out to another round of reviews.

The work you submitted is undoubtely interesting and I look forward to seeing your responses.

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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: General comments:

The manuscript addresses a relevant and interesting topic related to perceptual-cognitive expertise in sport, focusing on gaze behavior in volleyball players of varying expertise levels. The use of a dynamic, domain-specific task and the inclusion of a temporally structured analysis (Preparation vs. Rally phases) are clear strengths of the study. The methodological approach, including eye-tracking and linear mixed effects modeling, is appropriate and generally well-described.

At the same time, several aspects of the study require clarification, expansion, or revision to strengthen its scientific contribution and improve methodological transparency. The following points outline the main areas where the manuscript could benefit from improvement.

Major comments:

1. Lack of an explicitly stated hypothesis

• While the introduction is coherent and based on relevant literature, it does not culminate in a clearly formulated research hypothesis or set of hypotheses. A testable hypothesis—derived from prior findings—would help frame the aims of the study and guide interpretation of the results, especially with regard to expected differences across groups, tasks, and phases.

2. Justification for the novelty of the study

• The topic of perceptual-cognitive expertise in volleyball is not new, and several previous studies have addressed gaze dynamics in this domain (e.g., Fortin-Guichard et al., 2020; Piras et al., 2014). The authors briefly mention some distinguishing aspects (e.g., inclusion of an intermediate group, temporal analysis), but a more explicit and focused explanation of what new insights this study provides would enhance the manuscript’s originality and relevance.

3. Methods section:

Unequal group sizes and sample power

• The three expertise groups are notably unbalanced (n = 14 experts, n = 25 amateurs, n = 19 novices). This raises concerns regarding the statistical power of the analysis, particularly for detecting interaction effects in the linear mixed models.

• The manuscript does not report any a priori power analysis. The authors are encouraged to justify the sample size based on expected effect sizes or acknowledge this limitation explicitly in the discussion.

Monocular eye tracking (right eye only)

• The use of monocular (right-eye) tracking is not uncommon in eye-tracking research. However, given the task’s emphasis on visual attention and the importance of peripheral vision in sport-specific scenarios, it would be helpful for the authors to justify this decision or at least discuss its implications.

Statistical approach – appropriateness and clarity

• The use of linear mixed-effects models is appropriate for the study design. Nonetheless, the manuscript would benefit from:

• A clearer rationale for the choice of random effects structure,

• A statement on whether model assumptions (e.g., normality, homoscedasticity) were checked and met,

• More detail on how task block order was counterbalanced across participants.

4. Results: Missing analysis of prediction accuracy

• The main task required participants to anticipate the setter’s pass—a decision-making component that is central to the study’s rationale. However, the manuscript does not report participants’ accuracy in the Prediction condition. Including this data would provide essential behavioral context and allow stronger inferences about perceptual efficiency in relation to expertise.

5. Limitations section is too brief

• The limitations section should be expanded to reflect important considerations that may affect the interpretation of results. In particular:

• The lack of analysis by player position, which is known to influence visual search behavior (Fortin-Guichard et al., 2020),

• The possibility of learning or repetition effects, as participants viewed the same stimuli in both task conditions,

• The use of monocular tracking and constrained head position, which may reduce ecological validity in a sport-performance context.

Minor suggestions:

• Consider defining the concepts of “gaze anchors” or “visual pivots” more precisely and referencing foundational sources in this area.

• Lines 226–227 (Methods): the criteria for classifying saccades (velocity > 30°/s, etc.) should be supported with methodological references.

Reviewer #2: The authors present a study where they employed the temporal occlusion paradigm on video stimuli of national-level volleyball games (recorded from a bird's eye view, probably with a camera at the stand). The videos showed the scene from the preparation of a service "until the point before the setter plays the pass". In a (blocked, counter-balanced) “Prediction” condition, participants of three different expertise levels (19 novices, 25 amateur and 14 expert players) had to select one of four potential destinations of the setter’s pass. In a second “Control” condition, the task of the participants was simply to select one of three potential locations of the service player, a task without domain-specific knowledge requirements with respect to prediction of outcomes. Multiple gaze metrics (with respect to fixations and saccades) were recorded and analysed for the two time intervals before and after the service. In line with previous research, the authors found expertise-dependent differences for all groups (fewer fixations, longer fixation duration, fewer saccades), but only in the later time interval. In the first interval, only novices differed with comparatively higher rates of fixations and saccades, potentially indicating a more exporative gaze strategy of experts to gather situational knowledge and understanding already before the critical phase. The authors conclude that these findings emphasize the "importance of temporal dynamics" as well as a "comprehensive operationalization of perceptual-cognitive processes related to expertise".

While the authors seem follow a comprehensive and rigorous (statistical) analysis procedure, to me, the study design itself has several weaknesses, of which some seem not resolvable. Maybe this is due to the fact that the eye tracking part was only planned as "a secondary analysis [...] for the exploratory investigation of viewing behavior,[...] to look at the frequency of eye saccades and fixation times in specific regions of interest" (https://osf.io/exhr3). In the following, I will comment on four of theses weaknesses.

First and foremost, the authors claim a "high ecological validity of the stimulus" (e.g., l. 469). However, the bird's eye view is obviously a very unnatural perspective for a player. While this perspective might be ok to assess coaches (for what the original material was intended as far as I understood), there is a substantial amount of evidence that perceptual expertise unfolds (best) in representative environments and task conditions. In the study at hand, the perspective on the visual information, the purely passive reception (even with constrained head position), but also the task (to predict the ball's final destination or to judge the position of the service player) and the way responses had to be given (by button presses) seem not to align with consequences arising from this evidence. If one assumes that a player actively engages with the environment (and, e.g., creates and manipulates perception by moving around, but also changes information intake/gaze behavior depending on the task at hand), my main concern is related to what the study results really tell us with respect to expertise differences in volleyball - and my critical answer would be "close to nothing". This becomes even more clear when considering that the gaze metrics analysed (apart from the descriptive gaze density plots) only relate to temporal aspects of gaze behavior independent from the location of the gaze and therefore are not related to the information in the scene but rather a generic aspect of oculomotor behavior when watching a volleyball serve. I am not sure how to restructure the manuscrupt to resolve this issue and to still extend to the currently available body of knowledge with respect to gaze behavior, but I would be open to further discuss ideas to overcome it with the authors.

Second, I have come across some potential issues with respect to the experimental design and analysis (some of which are only mentioned in the already published work (<https: 10.1371=" " doi.org=" " journal.pone.0318234=" ">):

- "At the end of the video, the last frame (immediately before the pass of the setter) was displayed to the participants for 0.5 s as a freeze frame, which was defined as the Freeze phase." --> This potentially affects gaze behavior as the temporal availability of the last frame's information is much longer compared to the real-life situation and therefore contrasts the idea of the temporal occlusion paradigm.

- "Near side vs far side": in the original video set have been services from both teams - did you investigate them here as well? If so, I would expect differences in gaze behavior between these conditions due to the different visual angles which are covered.

- What is exactly "the point before the setter plays the pass"? The last frame, before the setter touches the ball or when the ball leaves the hand of the setter? Please be more clear here.

- Could the fixation cross in the screen's center affect the density plot or even the reported results? It seems they already fixate on a (potentially) information richt area and therefore could be biased in their natural gaze behavior. For better control, a fixation on a non information rich area at the edges of the screen seem advisable.

- How are the colors in the density plot scaled? How do differences in the amount of fixations across conditions affect the color / this plot?

- No sample size calculations for eye tracking have been reported/performed. How did you come up with the sample sizes - can you also comment/discuss the varying amount of participants in the different groups?

- Why don't you report gaze behavior differences with respect to unsuccessful/successful trials, but rather only across groups?

Third, there are several mentions of expertise-dependent efficiency differences when extracting information during fixations. To me, these arguments seem purely speculative without taking the relative locations of the fixation into account. So also this line of argumentation needs substantial rework and better justification.

And fourth and finally, also aspects with respect to the use of peripheral information can only properly discussed when analysis which information is visible in which peripheral eccentricity and whether it can be used to inform prediction and/or decision making.

I think at the current stage, more detailed feedback on the manuscript is not needed - to me these four issues need to be resolved first and this will probably cause a major rework of the manuscript's structure.</https:>

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PONE-D-25-10199R1More efficient gaze behavior in relation to expertise during tactical decision-making in volleyballPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Kanatschnig,

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.

 There were conficting appraisals from reviewers. A third reviewer chose not to reject the article, and offered some methodological considerations which need to be addressed. Hence, when the concerns of reviewer two and three are addressed, I will make a reasonable decision as to whether they were suitably addressed and the manuscript can be accepted for publication. 

Please submit your revised manuscript by Sep 13 2025 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.

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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.

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We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Job Fransen

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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If the reviewer comments include a recommendation to cite specific previously published works, please review and evaluate these publications to determine whether they are relevant and should be cited. There is no requirement to cite these works unless the editor has indicated otherwise. 

Additional Editor Comments:

Dear authors

As you know, we have had some issues in terms of conflicting reviews from the reviewers. I understand this article has been in review for a while, but I would rather have an article that is published and fully scrutinised, than one we have glossed over. The third reviewer has provided some additional revisions, and I would like to see you review their comments and those of reviewer two (who rejected). I will then make a final call on the suitability of the article for publication.

Again my apologies, but there is no substitute for a good and thorough review process, and I am very grateful to the reviewers for their comments.

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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: (No Response)

Reviewer #2: (No Response)

Reviewer #3: (No Response)

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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: No

Reviewer #3: Yes

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

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: I Don't Know

Reviewer #3: 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

Reviewer #3: 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

Reviewer #3: 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: The authors addressed most of the comments and implemented the changes that were feasible. I appreciate the effort they put into the revision. I have no further comments.

Reviewer #2: I pointed out 4 key issues in my previous review, which did render more detailed feedback on the manuscript superfluous at that stage. While the authors tried to address these in their revised work and the rebuttal, I am still not convinced that the submitted work provides valuable insights. I will try to be more concise this time and add details with respect to the content rather than the methodological aspects only.

l. 39f. You call your task a “tactical decision-making task”. I would rather argue that the task is an “observation and prediction task”. This notion is important as tactical decision making implies that the participant is engaged in the situation and tries to solve it, while in your setting the person is only observing movement patterns (related to my previous review: in unnatural viewing conditions for players) and trying to predict the setter’s target player.

l.59f. Gaze anchors and visual pivots are only meaningful if analysed with respect to the underlying SPATIOtemporal aspects of the stimuli. A purely temporal analysis cannot unveil these aspects (it could be, that more experienced persons just “know” where to look at and saccade directly to that stimulus (as you pointed out in l.68f), which would directly result in lower amounts of saccades and potentially longer fixations). This already calls for an AOI-based analysis of your data – which you already pointed out in your preregistration (“For the exploratory investigation of viewing behavior, we plan to look at the frequency of eye saccades and fixation times in specific regions of interest.”) and inferred its necessity in a later section of your introduction (l.88f). The narrowing down to fixation and saccade rates (l.95f.) is not substantiated at all.

l.64f. How does Faubert’s 3D-MOT task fit into the line of argumentation here?

l.101f. This is the first mention of the control task. To me, this control task is just a completely different task with clearly differing visual demands (e.g. focusing on one player only vs. a “tactical situation”). The rationale for incorporating this task does not become clear. To me, a task which purely manipulates domain knowledge requirements while keeping perceptual requirements identical would be the only fair comparison. Moreover, if employing standardized lab-based experiments, you should respect the max-con-min principle; it is not clear at all why you alter the amount of response options between experimental and control task (3 vs 4, see also l. 193f.). Is it correct that the videos also differed between the experimental and control task for the same condition as you defined the “action of interest” to be on the near or far side of the net (l. 231f.)? If so, this additionally confounds your experimental manipulation.

l.103f. This section is important but for me way too generic to be meaningful. A good introduction should set the stage, follow a funnel-like structure (narrowing down) and result in a clear-cut research question (even if you performed an exploratory design).

l. 107f. Parts of this section seem to belong to the introduction.

l. 166f. You showed women’s indoor volleyball situations to males and females but you did not mention this potentially confounding aspect. It is expected that domain-specific expertise unfolds (best) when confronted with situations the participants have experienced a lot – which is not true for men observing women’s games. This argument again can be extended with respect to the bird’s eye perspective (and even from the “wrong side” when confronted with the “FAR” condition) – but I raised this point during the first phase of the review already. At least a discussion with respect to higher (and unnatural) task demands (e.g., as you need to mentally rotate) compared to the real situation and their effects on your measures seems necessary.

l. 177f. I do not find a discussion of the varying duration of the preparation phase – from 3 to 10 seconds is quite a range which might influence gaze behavior (e.g., triggering exploratory viewing behavior purely because of longer durations).

l. 179f. It is not clear how a natural game situation can be “fixed” to exactly 3 seconds. There must be some time variation from service to the ball contact of the setter.

l. 247f. You argued in your rebuttal that the 500ms static image will not influence the viewing behaviour during the preparation and rally phase. I strongly disagree here as experts are very efficient in extracting relevant information (as you pointed out in your introduction). So, within a couple of trials I expect that experts only focus on extracting the information in the last 500ms – maybe with an exploratory viewing behaviour to optimally locate the gaze to the most information rich area. This would mean that the observed gaze behaviour difference during rally is completely irrelevant for them to solve the task. This is a fundamental flaw of the experiment, and you can only get (exploratory) insights when doing spatiotemporal analyses. This aspect has also consequences for your discussion (l. 454f) rendering these insights potentially meaningless for solving the task.

l.266f. There was a large initiative in establishing a reporting guideline for eyetracking experiments (Dunn et al. 2023, https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-023-02187-1), which tries to make eye tracking experiments more replicable and understandable for other researchers. This guideline should be followed. Moreover, the reference (Walcher et al. [36]) seems not to employ a standard way of classifying gaze into fixations and saccades – which contributes to confusion with respect to terminology (a fixation is something different than a smooth pursuit eye movement).

l. 321f. Your rationale for constructing the model emphasizes the point I already made in my prior review that viewing conditions are critical and systematically affect the gaze behavior observed. In my view, this is very critical. Turning it to the positive side: Maybe one could use this (unintended) manipulation of stimulus demands (having information in smaller or larger ranges of visual angles) to explore gaze behavior differences between near and far situations. The current way of analysis, however, weakens the findings.

l.337f. Can you be clearer about the effect of employing Benjamini-Hochberg adjustments to your stats?

l.360f. Figure heading: the coloring of the graph still seems misleading as one cannot compare between conditions (i.e. the same lightness means different things due to varying amounts of data). I think you should standardize this to help the reader understand and compare the graphs. In addition, these graphs only take on condition and neglect the other – so I guess it would be informative to see gaze densities but maybe also scan-paths for all conditions (to get a full picture of the viewing pattern).

l. 387f./401f. Please refrain from using “fixation rate” and “fixation duration” for the time intervals in which the participants can extract information from the visual scene – this is something different!

To sum up, due to the points raised in my previous review and now here in more detail I do not see the authors’ interpretations and conclusions justified. Maybe the data set might still provide interesting hints for future research when analysed in a clever (e.g., turning experimental design flaws into interesting aspects) and spatiotemporal (including AOI-based, but also more fine grained temporal analyses (e.g., separating the last 500ms from the rest of the rally)) way.

Reviewer #3: The paper reports on an eye tracking experiment conducted with novice, amateur and expert volleyball players. Although not presenting entirely novel findings, this was acknowledged by the author, and the paper still adds some insights to the known literature, as well as confirming some previous findings.

The authors already replied to the comments of two reviewers, which improved the manuscript. I would like to see this article published, but I think there needs to be some further clarification first. Below some additional comments to those already made by the other reviewers.

Comment #1

The title does not suit the content of the paper. The task in the experiment is to predict the direction of the pass. This is not tactical decision-making, it is pattern recognition and (mostly) anticipation. The participants do not need to make a decision (e.g. what is the best course of action), they need to predict. So I believe it is not suitable to refer to this experiment as decision making nor as tactical.

Comment #2:

Please refrain from using the wording ‘fewer fixations of longer duration’, as this could mean both that experts made fewer long fixations, or that they made fewer fixations but they were of longer duration. This also occurs a couple of times in the discussion.

See: Vansteenkiste, P. (2022). Fewer fixations of longer duration can lead to more fixations of longer duration: A commentary on the description of the visual behaviour of expert performers in sports. German Journal of Exercise and Sport Research, 52(1), 198-199.

Comment #3:

It is not clear to me why both Fixation rate and Saccade frequency is included in this study. Shouldn’t fixation rate and saccade rate be the same, assuming that a fixation is always followed by a saccade? In what case could fixation rate and saccade frequency be different? Unless I’m mistaking, I believe this metric (saccade frequency) could (and should) be omitted from the paper.

Comment#4:

With multiple conditions (group, task, phase) it is sometimes difficult to follow the results. The table refers to ‘task’ but the text refers to ‘condition’ when referring to ‘Prediction’ or ‘Control’. I would suggest to keep using the same term to refer to either the task or the condition.

In line with this, it is also not easy to compare the actual results to each other (e.g. fixation duration of experts an novices in the prediction task during the rally phase). Although this information is in the text, I think an extra table (perhaps as supplementary info) would benefit the clarity of the results. I would suggest to move table 3 to appendix and replace it by a similar table with the average +- SD results.

Comment #5

The experts in the prediction condition during rally had a Fixation duration of 1041 ms. However, their Fixation rate in this phase and condition was 1.21 fix/sec. How is an average frequency of more than 1 fixation per second possible if the average fixation duration is more than 1 second long?

Comment #6:

The authors already added the results of accuracy (from another paper: Kanatschnig et al. [2]) to the discussion, but I believe that it would be better to report this as results as well. However, I agree with the authors that this should not be elaborated on as it its discussed in another paper.

Comment #7:

L540: “It is necessary to emphasize that we were only able to observe these dynamic 541 patterns results through the distinction between Preparation and Rally phases, but also through 542 the inclusion of amateurs as an intermediate level group in our experimental design.”

Missing the word ‘not’: … were not only able to observe … ?

Comment #8:

The authors should also refer to a recent study with a very similar experimental design:

Zhu, R., Zou, D., Wang, K., & Cao, C. (2024). Expert performance in action anticipation: visual search behavior in volleyball spiking defense from different viewing perspectives. Behavioral Sciences, 14(3), 163.

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

Reviewer #3: Yes:  Pieter Vansteenkiste

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Expertise-driven temporal gaze dynamics during anticipation in volleyball

PONE-D-25-10199R2

Dear Dr. Kanatschnig,

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Reviewer #3: All comments have been addressed

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Reviewer #3: Yes

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Reviewer #3: Yes

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Reviewer #3: Yes

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Reviewer #3: My comments have been addressed appropriately.

I thank the authors for their clear responses and congratulate them with this excellent study.

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Reviewer #3: Yes:  Pieter Vansteenkiste

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