-->PONE-D-25-48883-->-->Why do self-referent cues facilitate problem-solving? Insights from eye tracking-->-->PLOS ONE

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Reviewers' comments:

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Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Partly

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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.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.-->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.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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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: This study used eye-tracking to investigate how self-referential pronouns influence children’s performance and processing during mathematical word problem solving. Although the valid sample size (N = 53) is relatively small, the experimental design is rigorous, and the discussion offers valuable insights. The following comments and suggestions are provided for the authors’ consideration.

1. During the eye-tracking procedure, was a chin rest used to stabilize participants’ heads? Please also report the sample rate of the valid eye-tracking data. Although the Tobii Pro X3-120 allows for some head movement, in my experience, the absence of a chin rest can result in considerable data loss.

2. In reading research, fixations shorter than 100 ms are typically removed. Did the present study follow this convention?

3. In Section 3.1 Data Cleaning, the sentence “Finally, we also removed trials for which the total fixation time on the word problem was < 1000 ms” is ambiguous. Does this refer to the total fixation duration across all areas of interest (i.e., all words) for a given problem?

4. Sections 3.2 and 3.3 report analyses based on a 2 (Referent) × 2 (Operation) design. It would be helpful to provide descriptive statistics (means and standard deviations) for the dependent variables—accuracy and response times—corresponding to each cell of the 2 × 2 design.

5. Table 2 is presented in an unusually simplified format. Please revise it according to the APA 7th edition guidelines for table presentation.

6. The number of decimal places across the manuscript is inconsistent. Please ensure uniform formatting in accordance with APA 7th edition requirements.

7. In Table 3, the mean value for Total Fixation Time of Non-Key Terms appears to be incorrect.

8. In Figure 3, the y-axis is labeled “Total Looking Time.” Is this intended to represent the same variable as “Total Fixation Time” mentioned in the text? Please ensure consistent terminology throughout.

Reviewer #2: Thank you for the possibility to review this very interesting contribution. The paper reports a study on the effect of self-referent cues (or personalization) on eye movements during word problem solving. The theoretical background of the paper is very sound and the rationale behind the research questions is flawless. The design of the study is also very well done and takes into accounts many of the methodological challenges of experimental eye-tracking research in a very effective way. However, starting with the reports of the results, the quality of the paper drops quite a bit. I will try to outline the issues that I see in the following. Due to the very promising design and the relevance of the topic, I am confident that the authors will be able to bring this manuscript into a version that is acceptable for publication after major revisions.

I only have two major remarks for the introduction:

- you should avoid the term “problem-solving“ and rather specify “word-problem solving” (p.12), as problem-solving usually refers to other tasks.

- p.13: There are some more recent works on eye movements and word problem solving which might be interesting (or not, please don’t see this as a request to cite these papers – it’s really just in case you are not aware and might find them helpful: https://doi.org/10.1037/cep0000366, https://doi.org/10.1080/00461520.2019.1691004, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.learninstruc.2025.102235)

Methods:

- If possible, you the calibration and validation accuracy would be very helpful to judge whether your eye-tracking setup was sufficiently accurate to distinguish the AOIs. I guess the words were far enough apart, but can you quantify that?

- Response time data cleaning (2.5 SD) – was this done with the log-transformed data? If not, would that make a difference?

- The way that the results of the GLMM and the LMM are reported seems unusual to me. The random effects structure itself is (to me) not as important as the parameter estimates. I think APA does not explicitly include GLLMs, but I personally think it is common to report a table with all fixed effects estimates, SE, CI, p, marginal and conditional R squared, and the random effects variances. I would ask the authors to do some research on best practice of reporting these analyses.

- In general, the presentation of the results is a bit hard to read. I can interpret the t-values, but only if I know how the predictors were coded. It would be helpful to also have a table with the descriptive mean values for each condition, or the estimated marginal means, or the fixed effects with a note on how the predictor was coded (I think one of the three would be sufficient).

Discussion

- The result that the pronouns are looked at shorter than the corresponding names. Interestingly, a total effect on response time was only reported for subtraction problems. So the effect of personalization is there, but why does it only affect the reaction time in subtraction problems? Your argument is that it is because the subtraction problems are harder, but this seems a bit far-fetched to me given that they were not actually solved less accurately in this study.

- p. 27 “reflected in different gaze patterns” – I would argue that fixation durations are not “gaze patterns” (in contrast to maybe revisits)

- p. 27 “relative to other character terms” – a) I don’t know what a “character term” is, but maybe this is a lack of English proficiency on my side b) The comparison was between the pronoun and the name, not between the Pronoun and the other parts of the problem, was it not?

- I don’t think the working memory hypothesis is supported by the data. In contrast, I think it even speaks against it: If working memory load had been increased by the use of impersonal names, this load should spill over to the reading of the other words as well. To me, the fact that only the fixation duration on the pronoun itself was quicker rather shows that this particular word is processed quicker (which is to be expected, since it is much more common than the corresponding names, as you also acknowledge). So while I think the hypothesis is absolutely valid, I think the data is not in favor of it. In contrast, I would argue that your data shows that it might be precisely the reading part (perception) that is affected, not the building of the situation model (which would be visible throughout the whole solution process and not just in fixations on the pronoun)

- “Did not have a high enough resolution to analyse the number of revisitations” – An eye tracker with a sampling rate of 8Hz should be more than capable of providing sufficient data to detect fixations. Taking only the raw data is not what this system is built for, and event detection algorithms (also open source ones) are very robust and efficient. Especially since the authors discuss the possible insights from analyses of revisits, I encourage them to find a way to run the data through an event-detection-algorithms and filtering for fixations. This would allow the authors to test the assumptions that they make in the discussion about revisits. (and this would also allow the authors to include the mean fixation duration as another outcome measure, which is often assumed to be related to working memory load).

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

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<p>Why do self-referent cues facilitate problem-solving? Insights from eye tracking

PONE-D-25-48883R1

Dear Dr. March,

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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Laura Morett

Academic Editor

PLOS One

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

Apologies again for the protracted review process due to difficulties securing two reviewers with relevant expertise initially. At this point, the reviewers are satisfied with the revised manuscript, and I agree that it is suitable for publication. Therefore, I am, pleased to recommend acceptance.

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.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.-->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.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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-->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: The authors have addressed all the concerns raised in the previous round of review. The revisions are appropriate, and the clarifications provided have significantly improved the clarity of the manuscript. I have no further comments and recommend the paper for publication.

Reviewer #2: Thank you for the opportunity to review this paper again. The authors have taken all previous comments seriously and provided detailed responses. I think the manuscript improved substantially, and I think it can be accepted in this form. I have some smaller remaining comments for the authors to consider, but none of these points require an additional round of reviews from my end.

I have now (in contrast to my first review) clicked the box that not all data is freely available. This is because I wanted to check whether indeed the data quality is insufficient to run an event detection algorithm. I noticed that only the aggregated eye-tracking data is uploaded, but not the raw data. The editor should decide if this is necessary.

In my first review, I noted that the SD-cutoff was done before the log-transformation. The authors have convincingly shown that this does not make a difference in the interpretation of the data and thus decided to go with their original analysis. Similarly, they have decided not to include the suggested analyses of revisits, party with the argument that they want to stick as much as they can with the pre-registration. Honestly, this seems a bit like the easy answer. The argument that the authors want to follow the re-registration as closely as possible seems to contradict the purpose of the peer-review process: If the analysis is not open for debate, there is no use in a review process. The fact that the log-transformation does not make a difference does not mean that it is the better way to do it. I would have expected the authors to evaluate which approach is sounder (on a theoretical basis), and then choose this approach (whichever it is), rather than simply checking if changes are necessary and then stick with their previous version.

I would still argue that the sampling rate of 8 Hz is high enough to analyze revisits. If data quality is indeed the bottleneck, this should be made explicit in the discussion instead of arguing that the sampling rate was insufficient. I also don’t think it is correct that event detection algorithms only filter upwards and downwards movements. Again, these arguments sound a bit like an excuse not to change the analyses, which is understandable, but should not be the guiding principle.

A small detail: Fixation count should be multiplied by 8 1/3, not by 8, since 1000/120 is not 8. This might be the ultimate test: Implementing this will not change any results but will be annoying and correct. I call for the authors’ perfectionism and thank them for allowing me (without a choice) to formulate my critique so openly. Thanks for the great work and the productive process, all the best with the publication!

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Reviewer #1: Yes: Chao-Jung WuChao-Jung WuChao-Jung WuChao-Jung Wu

Reviewer #2: No

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