Peer Review History
Original SubmissionJanuary 9, 2020 |
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PONE-D-20-00636 A social approach to cognitive flexibility: Congruency effects during spontaneous word-by-word interaction PLOS ONE Dear Mrs. Schwenke, Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version (major revisions) of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process. We would appreciate receiving your revised manuscript by Jun 21 2020 11:59PM. When you are 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. If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. To enhance the reproducibility of your results, we recommend that if applicable you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io, where a protocol can be assigned its own identifier (DOI) such that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:
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Additional Editor Comments (if provided): The two reviewers raise very similar points: the central example that positions your research is confusing, the research question is at best lacking in detail (but, as reviewer 2 indicates, it also does not seem to clearly follow from the literature you present, and the research question that is (implicitly) presented seems to be of little scientific relevance, at least in the way it is communicated now), and the results need to be more rigorously analysed and interpreted. These issues deal with the backbone of this manuscript, and should therefore be fundamentally addressed before I can consider this manuscript for publication. [Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.] 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: Yes Reviewer #2: No ********** 2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: No ********** 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 ********** 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 ********** 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 paper reports a novel study on participants' ability to create sentences together, providing a new route to test cognitive flexibility in social context. I like the idea for the study and find the results interesting. However, the authors should try to better embed the study in the existing literature, motivate the predictions more clearly, report an additional analysis on the number of turns taken, and discuss the results in more detail. Specific comments: The example of the two friends cooking is nice but has some misleading elements. The fact that they were debating whether to order pizza or to cook spaghetti seems irrelevant. Also, waiting for 30 minutes for a friend to arrive does not seem all that odd. The authors would like to illustrate " the sticking to initial assumptions despite evidence for the contrary ", but is the friend's not being on time clear evidence to the contrary in the example? It would help to clear and sharpen this example case. The first paragraph is very long and should be divided into two or three. In the review of relevant literature, it may be useful to consider this study on joint task switching: Dudarev, V., & Hassin, R. R. (2016). Social task switching: On the automatic social engagement of executive functions. Cognition, 146, 223-228. The authors should also consider including earlier work on joint task performance that has used sentence completion, in particular research by Gami and colleagues: Corps, R. E., Gambi, C., & Pickering, M. J. (2018). Coordinating utterances during turn-taking: The role of prediction, response preparation, and articulation. Discourse Processes, 55(2), 230-240. Corps, R. E., Pickering, M. J., & Gambi, C. (2019). Predicting turn-ends in discourse context. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 34(5), 615-627. Furthermore, there is work on joint word production that seems relevant: Kuhlen, A. K., & Rahman, R. A. (2017). Having a task partner affects lexical retrieval: Spoken word production in shared task settings. Cognition, 166, 94-106. The hypotheses need more justification. What exactly motivates the prediction that participants should have faster response times on congruent trials? In what sense are incongruent trials truly incongruent, given that the target words to be used by each participant are semantically related? Why do the authors predict that being able to see each other would reduce the effect of congruency? What motivates predictions concerning specific correlations between solo cognitive tasks and joint performance? A clear link between what is known based on the existing literature and the predictions is needed. Solo Cognitive Tasks: Were pairs of participants tested at the same time? Did they complete the tasks facing each other? This should be specified in the methods section. Analyses: It would be informative to know the number of turns participants needed to complete the task. Were there more turns in the incongruent condition? The General Discussion should be expanded to discuss potential mechanisms underlying the observed effects as well as limitations of the study in more detail. Line 107: delete the question mark Line 116: co-actors should be co-actor's Line 141 incomplete sentence Line 146, Declaration of Helsinki: The authors should state the year, because to comply with the most recent version of the Declaration, pre-registration is mandatory. Reviewer #2: Summary: In the paper "A social approach to cognitive flexibility: Congruency effects during spontaneous word-by-word interaction" the authors explore a novel task to measure cognitive flexibility in a more social context than other standard measures of cognitive flexibility. While the idea of this task is, as far as I can tell, indeed novel, this paper is not suitable for publication in the psychological or psycholinguistic literature, and in my view even less for publication in a general journal like PLOS-ONE. First, the writing would need to be substantially improved. There are many oddly placed commas (in English, the words "although" and "that", when starting a relative clause, are not followed by a comma), and marked formulations, and a sentence that ends in mid-air (line 141). These errors are of course easily corrected, but my point is that they *should* be corrected before the paper is submitted to a scientific journal, e.g. by asking a native speaker of English, or a colleague with more experience in writing in English, to proofread it. More importantly, many parts of the manuscript, including the abstract, are hard to follow. The example at the beginning of the introduction (two friends who both believe a dinner is taking place at their place) appears to have little to do with cognitive flexibility, but rather with mismatching representations of an earlier-made agreement. The authors write about this: "it often seems striking how the assumptions held by both sides overshadowed the inconsistencies in the initial planning." The reader is left to wonder: yes, how could they not have noticed this misunderstanding, as this is not explained in the text. But whatever the reason, it seems unlikely to have been caused by a lack of cognitive flexibility, because that's not how misunderstandings of this sort typically arise. So, the reader then wonders what the point is of the example and how it relates to the issue of cognitive flexibility. Is it that the friends (or at least one of them) now have to stop cooking and attend to different cognitive tasks? Second: There is no research question. Normally, the literature is reviewed, an issue arising from this review is presented, and this issue is then condensed into a scientific question of importance (at least for the field), and then addressed with an experimental study aimed at answering that specific question as well as possible. The implicit research question here seems to be "does this new task we invented, which we think might measure cognitive flexibility, and which we have reason to believe is more social and natural than the traditional ones, elicit the effects which we think it should?" This is a very specific and ad-hoc question, and the authors do not make clear how this specific issue is of general interest for the field of cognitive psychology. Third, there is no good theoretical motivation for the explored task. The authors claim that it is more natural and more social, because it involves one person's utterance to be the input for the next person's task, and so on. This of course creates interdependency between what the two participants do, but that does not necessarily make the task natural or social. The ecological validity of the task is, I believe, very low, and if the authors would want to claim that it is sufficiently high, they need to provide clear arguments for that claim. Personally, I find it hard to imagine many situations situation in our daily lives where the ability to collectively formulate a grammatical sentence by alternatingly and spontaneously providing a word would be useful. Also, the task seems fundamentally different in the level of processing from the three other tasks that it is compared with. Contrary to the other tasks, which all involve cognitive control at relatively peripheral levels, the new task involves a number of simultaneous higher-cognitive subtasks: the parsing of the words, the constructing of higher-level linguistic representations, word recognition, semantic processing, and memory components. Each of these sub-tasks literally have entire scientific sub-fields devoted to studying them. And these sub-processes also run in parallel in the participant's brain, which adds an entire additional level of complexity. This means that there are so many things happening in the participant's mind/brain during this task that whatever the results that were to come out of it, they are very difficult to be pinned down to specific cognitive variables. And I see no compelling reason to believe that the task is more sensitive to cognitive flexibility than to any of the other variables that are involved in the list of simultaneously running sub-processes in my, almost certainly incomplete, list above. Finally, the results of the study are not encouraging and hard to interpret. First, there was no significant effect on visibility. The authors suggest that that was because the participants may not have chosen to exploit the visual channel, but another possibility is that the study was just severely underpowered, as the power analysis on which the design was based was on a within-participant effect of medium strength. Not on a potentially small effect in a between-participant effect (which has much lower power). Second, the TTRT was not correlated with any of the standard flexibility tasks. Third, the CE difference was only weakly correlated with one of the tasks, while the p-value of that test was not corrected for the number of correlation tests (e.g. using the Bonferroni method). So according to the results, the task seems not to behave as expected or desired. This is, however, not the conclusion that the authors draw. For these reasons, I believe that this study is not publishable in PLOS-ONE. ********** 6. 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. 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Revision 1 |
An approach to social flexibility: Congruency effects during spontaneous word-by-word interaction PONE-D-20-00636R1 Dear Dr. Schwenke, 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. An invoice for payment will follow shortly after the formal acceptance. To ensure an efficient process, please log into Editorial Manager at http://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/, click the 'Update My Information' link at the top of the page, and double check that your user information is up-to-date. If you have any billing related questions, please contact our Author Billing department directly at authorbilling@plos.org. If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper to help maximize its impact. If they’ll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team as soon as possible -- no later than 48 hours after receiving the formal acceptance. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact onepress@plos.org. Kind regards, Marte Otten, Ph.D. Academic Editor PLOS ONE |
Formally Accepted |
PONE-D-20-00636R1 An approach to social flexibility: Congruency effects during spontaneous word-by-word interaction Dear Dr. Schwenke: I'm pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been deemed suitable for publication in PLOS ONE. Congratulations! Your manuscript is now with our production department. If your institution or institutions have a press office, please let them know about your upcoming paper now to help maximize its impact. If they'll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team within the next 48 hours. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information please contact onepress@plos.org. If we can help with anything else, please email us at plosone@plos.org. Thank you for submitting your work to PLOS ONE and supporting open access. Kind regards, PLOS ONE Editorial Office Staff on behalf of Dr. Marte Otten Academic Editor PLOS ONE |
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