-->PONE-D-25-52975-->-->Gaze dynamics prior to navigation support hierarchical planning-->-->PLOS One

Dear Dr. Pezzulo,

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PLOS One

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Reviewer #1: Yes

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Reviewer #1: Yes

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Reviewer #1: Yes

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-->5. Review Comments to the Author

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Reviewer #1: The paper asks whether (1) pre-navigation gaze reflects hierarchical planning and predicts future trajectories, (2) how subgoals are selected, and (3) which gaze patterns predict success. Participants perform a VR navigation task: they pilot a boat to collect a subset of goals from a larger set of potential cache locations. A location is confirmed as a goal only once it comes into line-of-sight, so planning must account for uncertainty and trade off maximizing goal collection with minimizing time/distance. The environment is a landscape whose features affect strategy: water and muddy water are navigable; land is not traversable; walls/obstacles block vision and movement.

Each trial has three phases: (1) planning (15 s) by viewing a 2D map of the environment; (2) a brief transition; and (3) boat navigation in 3D (VR). Gaze transitions and fixations are recorded throughout, but analyses focus on the 15s planning phase.

Results show robust relationships between planning-phase gaze and quantitative map features and task performance metrics, with clear signatures of a hierarchical, bidirectional planning process. These results hold across uncertainty conditions. Top and bottom performers differ: top performers show higher trajectory predictability from planning gaze and earlier attention to task-relevant regions. Finally, gaze concentrates on bottlenecks/subgoals (“critical tiles”) rather than arbitrary locations.

Some notes:

The feature maps are visually appealing and intuitively convey task-relevant structure. However:

figures would benefit from tile-specific labels (e.g. water, land) or reinforce them in the figure caption;

the white start dot is very small and doesn’t immediately anchor the reader;

each feature map should include a legend with its colormap range.

It’s a strength that the tile taxonomy maps onto real-world constraints (e.g., “muddy water” as a slowdown/crowding analogue). From a simple environment, the authors derive a rich set of planning-relevant features that plausibly generalize beyond the task.

It is interesting to observe how fixations shift between tile types across different planning phases. To strengthen this analysis, it would be helpful to include the distribution of each tile type across the trajectory, to determine whether the observed differences in fixation patterns are driven by the structure of the environment or by participants’ planning behavior.

It would be helpful to see representative gaze trajectories for top vs. bottom performers to illustrate the most salient group differences (the current Supplementary Figure 1 points in this direction).

To aid interpretation (specially for immediate understanding of the 2D “info-graph” (Fig. 3)), consider adding small 3D environment snapshots highlighting key bottlenecks: cases where all goals are visible but the efficient path remains ambiguous because a wall forces a left/right corridor choice (memory-dependent uncertainty), and clear examples of “critical” tiles.

Since critical tiles most strongly predict planning gaze, brief, plain-language definitions in the captions would help (e.g., a gate tile whose closure would block passage; a corridor mouth; an obstacle edge whose absence would reveal a goal).

Consider presenting how relevant critical tiles are for the optimal trajectory of each map to disentangle attention driven by task relevance from attention driven by map structure alone.

It would be interesting to see how planning gaze compares to navigation gaze, i.e. how do offline planning and online planning gaze patterns differ.

Overall, the exposition of several concepts could be tightened, but the map visualizations are compelling, and the targeting of different features across the planned trajectory is well motivated. None of these presentation issues alter the core contribution: planning-time gaze provides a sensitive window onto hierarchical subgoaling in navigation, and attention concentrates on the true hinge points of the environment. As a minor point, there are a few grammatical errors and some figures not properly referenced in the text. I believe eye-tracking is a valuable tool for understanding internal cognitive processes in a non-invasive way, and this paper aligns well with that goal. It also has potential for growth and for the integration of more complex paradigms and behavioral recordings. I consider it a relevant and worthwhile contribution for publication after minor adjustments.

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Reviewer #1: No

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-->PONE-D-25-52975R1-->-->Gaze dynamics prior to navigation support hierarchical planning-->-->PLOS One

Dear Dr. Pezzulo,

Thank you for submitting your revised manuscript to PLOS ONE. Based on the reviewers' comments, we believe your manuscript is almost ready for publication, pending minor changes. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process.

Please submit your revised manuscript by May 07 2026 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.

Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:-->

• A letter that responds to each point raised by the academic editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'.
• A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'.
• An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Manuscript'.

-->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.

If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols. Additionally, PLOS ONE offers an option for publishing peer-reviewed Lab Protocol articles, which describe protocols hosted on protocols.io. Read more information on sharing protocols at https://plos.org/protocols?utm_medium=editorial-email&utm_source=authorletters&utm_campaign=protocols.

We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Antoine Coutrot

Academic Editor

PLOS One

Journal Requirements:

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.

Please review your reference list to ensure that it is complete and correct. If you have cited papers that have been retracted, please include the rationale for doing so in the manuscript text, or remove these references and replace them with relevant current references. Any changes to the reference list should be mentioned in the rebuttal letter that accompanies your revised manuscript. If you need to cite a retracted article, indicate the article’s retracted status in the References list and also include a citation and full reference for the retraction notice.

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

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Reviewer #1: (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

**********

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

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

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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: I thank you for the careful consideration of the points raised by me in the first revision. Most of the points were accurately addressed. Figure 2 has greatly improved in clarity due to modified legends and annotations. For each map, animations were provided comparing top vs. bottom performers’ gaze trajectories, which complement the reading in a meaningful way. I consider the new explanation of “critical tiles” in the description of Table 2 to be to the point and to clarify my initial concerns.

A video of 3D navigation from the participant’s POV was also provided, which improved the interpretation of Figure 3, and general interpretation of the 2D maps. I raise awareness for a timing mismatch in the text. The video is 2 minutes and 33 seconds long, and the authors point to the 29 seconds mark as referring to Map 6. However, the map at this timepoint corresponds to Map 2, with Map 6 only being shown from 53”-1’39”.

Regarding my previously raised point: “it would be helpful to include the distribution of each tile type across the trajectory, to determine whether the observed differences in fixation patterns are driven by the structure of the environment or by participants’ planning behavior” – which was raised in Figure 5 and addressed in S2 Appendix, what I meant to ask was:

From what I see in Figure 4 (5th column), gaze trajectories are reward-to-origin, since distance from origin decreases after the initial jump. If a participant starts planning from the reward location, and there are in general more e.g. walls near the reward compared to near the origin, then the fixation duration of wall tiles would be higher in the first half of planning (closer to reward), compared to the second. If you normalize fixations by their frequency in the spatial segment covered by each half of the planning gaze trajectory in each map (not map frequency, nor visited frequency), this effect is balanced and results are more planning-relevant.

Nevertheless, the additional analysis comparing fixation duration proportions with visit frequencies across all individuals' navigated routes further validates the effect of higher attention taken to “muddy water” and “reward” as being driven by task relevancy, as seen in S7 Figure. And if we consider the spatial segment covered by planning gaze to be correlated to navigated routes, we can infer the results would be similar, with the only benefit of analysing these spatial segments being the inclusion of “land” and “wall” tile types. I thank you for this additional effort.

Overall, the paper is reading with more clarity and I believe it is ready for publication after minor adjustments.

**********

-->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.

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Reviewer #1: No

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NAAS will assess whether your figures meet our technical requirements by comparing each figure against our figure specifications.

-->

Gaze dynamics prior to navigation support hierarchical planning

PONE-D-25-52975R2

Dear Dr. Pezzulo,

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,

Antoine Coutrot

Academic Editor

PLOS One

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