PONE-D-26-07087At the Roots of Plant Awareness Disparity (PAD): Semantic processing and Numerosity PerceptionPLOS One

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Additional Editor Comments:

As you can see, two experts accepted my invitation to evaluate your study: one of the Reviewer is fully convinced and support the publication of the manuscript in its present form. The other Reviewers highlights some issues that in my opinion can be addressed by you. In particular, the Reviewer asked to specify the rationale of the exclusion of values outside the 4-12 range, to better explain overdispersion and distribution of data.

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: No

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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: No

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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: Its a simple analysis examining whether plants disparately ignored compared to animals. The results are straight froward and clear and their analyses properly conducted with rigorous statistial analysis. The paper should be accepted as it is

Reviewer #2: The authors Silvia Guerra, Marco Roccato, Carolina Maria Oletto, Andrea Ghiani, Marco Bertamini and Luca Battaglini investigated whether PAD affacts numerosity perception and whether the difference in numerosity perception is caused by the green colour of plants or by semantic recognition. For this, three types of experiments were conducted. The first one testing numerosity perception with coloured items, the second one with black and white items and the third one with items turned by 180° to test for semantic recognition. The study participants had two independent tasks for each experiment, the first was to estimate the number of items, the second was a comparison task. They found that PAD affects numerosity perception of plants based on semantic recognition and not on colour perception.

The study is novel and investigates a phenomenon with important social impact. While the partcipant size, the experimental set-up and the statistical approach seem reasonable, I do have some doubts about the participants involved and the statistics that should be addressed in the paper.

Major concerns/ questions:

- Is there any information on the residence of the participants? It is suggested that people growing up in urban settings are more disconnected to nature and are more likely to have a "nature deficit". So I could imagine that they also differ in PAD or numerosity perception of plants. Did you look into this?

- Statistics: The statistical approach seems appropriate, particularly the use of mixed-models for trial-level data and binominal models for accuracy. What I miss is a reason to exclude values outside the 4-12 range - it seems a bit arbitrary to me. Furthermore, the authors don't report whether model assupmtions were checked. I would like to see that the residuals are approximately normally distributed. For the binominal models, did you check for overdispersion?

- I think the results section would benefit from some more context. It would be nice to start each section with a reminder of the leading hypothesis followed by the results.

- Figure 3: In my view the legend is not comprehensive and should include the statistical method. I would also like to see statistical differences marked with an asteriks in the figure itself.

Minor concerns:

- the resolution of the figures is poor

- "across experiment types" vs"versions" is inconsistent wording.

I would also like to point out that I really enjoyed the discussion and that I valued that interventions were addressed.

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Reviewer #1: Yes: anthony trewavas

Reviewer #2: No

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At the Roots of Plant Awareness Disparity (PAD): Semantic processing and Numerosity Perception

PONE-D-26-07087R1

Dear Dr. Guerra,

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,

Giulia Prete

Academic Editor

PLOS One

Additional Editor Comments:

As you can see, one of the previous reviewers accepted my invitation to review the new version of your manuscript and recommended its acceptance. The other had recommended acceptance in the first round of review, so he/she was not reinvited. I've also read the new version and am happy to approve its publication in its current form. Congratulations!

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 #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 #2: Yes

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

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 #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 #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 #2: I thank the authors for addressing all my concerns. With these changes I think the manuscript is ready for publication.

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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 #2: No

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