Evidence against implicit belief processing in a blindfold task

Katrin Rothmaler; Charlotte Grosse Wiesmann

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0294136

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionFebruary 3, 2023
12 Jul 2023 Decision Letter - Shrisha Rao, Editor PONE-D-23-03185Evidence against implicit belief processing in a blindfold taskPLOS ONE Dear Dr. Rothmaler, 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. ============================== The reviewers liked the paper and found the authors work and claims valuable and persuasive. However, one reviewer suggested considering an additional work and improving the discussion in light of the same. ============================== Please submit your revised manuscript by Aug 26 2023 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. 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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 ******** 2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 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: Yes ****** 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: Summary: In this work, the authors want to see if humans exhibit altercentric bias. They study this through a modification of existing object detection task, by introducing a blindfold (which may or may not be opaque). This ensures the stimuli remains the same, which was not so in earlier work.The participants are familiarized with the blindfolds, and the agent's belief could therefore, be inferred based on participants' experience. The second study is to understand the relationship between egocentric bias and altercentric bias (the two are expected to be opposing). To do this, they employ an action detection task. They find that reaction times were driven by congruency (not belief; therefore no altercentric bias). The authors have pre-registered the experiments, and the statistical analyses look fine to me. The complete data is NOT yet available, but I see that the authors have stated they'd make it available on OSF upon acceptance. I am not sure whether there is enough of a contribution or novelty here, but I don't have any issues with the experiments, analyses, or conclusion. Reviewer #2: This paper addresses a central question about implicit theory of mind by addressing the existence of an altercentric bias crated by another person's false belief. The two experiments are very impressive and the data carefully analysed. Very impressive. The main objective is to sharpen claims based on existing evidence. For this the authors combined the method pioneered by Kovacs et al (2010) with transparent/opaque goggles. An effect with this addition would show that the bias could not be due to the socio-attentional processes but must be due to a cognitively inferred belief. Indeed if the altercercentric bias could have been found under these conditions it would have been valuable evidence for its existence. But the evidence is strongly negative. This creates a different problem of interpretation as the authors acknowledge in their General Discussion. One of these counterarguments is that inferring a person's visual access from which goggles the person is wearing is beyond implicit processing. So no wonder that no altercentric bias could be found under these conditions. This counterargument could be attenuated if there was evidence that implicit processing is possible with goggles. There was, I think to remember, such evidence in the context of automatic gaze following (Teufel et al 2013). The authors might want to sharpen their conclusions with the help of this work—provided no strong counterevidence has accumulated since. Teufel, C., Alexis, D. M., Clayton, N. S., & Davis, G. (2010). Mental-state attribution drives rapid, reflexive gaze following. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 72(3), 695-705. ****** 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. Reviewer #1: No Reviewer #2: No ******** [NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.] While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0294136.r001
Revision 1
19 Oct 2023 Author Response Response to the editor 1. Please ensure that your manuscript meets PLOS ONE's style requirements, including those for file naming. The PLOS ONE style templates can be found at https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=wjVg/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_main_body.pdf and https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=ba62/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_title_authors_affiliations.pdf. We have ensured that the manuscript meets all style requirements. 2. We note that you have stated that you will provide repository information for your data at acceptance. Should your manuscript be accepted for publication, we will hold it until you provide the relevant accession numbers or DOIs necessary to access your data. If you wish to make changes to your Data Availability statement, please describe these changes in your cover letter and we will update your Data Availability statement to reflect the information you provide. We will ensure to provide repository information for our data upon acceptance. 3. We note that Figure 1 includes an image of a [patient / participant / in the study]. As per the PLOS ONE policy (http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-human-subjects-research) on papers that include identifying, or potentially identifying, information, the individual(s) or parent(s)/guardian(s) must be informed of the terms of the PLOS open-access (CC-BY) license and provide specific permission for publication of these details under the terms of this license. Please download the Consent Form for Publication in a PLOS Journal (http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=8ce6/plos-consent-form-english.pdf). The signed consent form should not be submitted with the manuscript, but should be securely filed in the individual's case notes. Please amend the methods section and ethics statement of the manuscript to explicitly state that the patient/participant has provided consent for publication: “The individual in this manuscript has given written informed consent (as outlined in PLOS consent form) to publish these case details”. If you are unable to obtain consent from the subject of the photograph, you will need to remove the figure and any other textual identifying information or case descriptions for this individual. Thank you for this note. We have gathered the signed consent form and amended a statement that the individual in the figure has given written informed consent (as outlined in PLOS consent form) to publish her photo. 4. 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. We have reviewed the reference list and added the following reference due to the comment of reviewer #2: Teufel, C., Alexis, D. M., Clayton, N. S., & Davis, G. (2010). Mental-state attribution drives rapid, reflexive gaze following. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 72(3), 695-705. Response to reviewer #1: Reviewer #1: Summary: In this work, the authors want to see if humans exhibit altercentric bias. They study this through a modification of existing object detection task, by introducing a blindfold (which may or may not be opaque). This ensures the stimuli remains the same, which was not so in earlier work.The participants are familiarized with the blindfolds, and the agent's belief could therefore, be inferred based on participants' experience. The second study is to understand the relationship between egocentric bias and altercentric bias (the two are expected to be opposing). To do this, they employ an action detection task. They find that reaction times were driven by congruency (not belief; therefore no altercentric bias). The authors have pre-registered the experiments, and the statistical analyses look fine to me. The complete data is NOT yet available, but I see that the authors have stated they'd make it available on OSF upon acceptance. I am not sure whether there is enough of a contribution or novelty here, but I don't have any issues with the experiments, analyses, or conclusion. We thank the reviewer very much for their positive feedback. Response to reviewer #2: Reviewer #2: This paper addresses a central question about implicit theory of mind by addressing the existence of an altercentric bias crated by another person's false belief. The two experiments are very impressive and the data carefully analysed. Very impressive. The main objective is to sharpen claims based on existing evidence. For this the authors combined the method pioneered by Kovacs et al (2010) with transparent/opaque goggles. An effect with this addition would show that the bias could not be due to the socio-attentional processes but must be due to a cognitively inferred belief. Indeed if the altercercentric bias could have been found under these conditions it would have been valuable evidence for its existence. But the evidence is strongly negative. This creates a different problem of interpretation as the authors acknowledge in their General Discussion. One of these counterarguments is that inferring a person's visual access from which goggles the person is wearing is beyond implicit processing. So no wonder that no altercentric bias could be found under these conditions. This counterargument could be attenuated if there was evidence that implicit processing is possible with goggles. There was, I think to remember, such evidence in the context of automatic gaze following (Teufel et al 2013). The authors might want to sharpen their conclusions with the help of this work—provided no strong counterevidence has accumulated since. Teufel, C., Alexis, D. M., Clayton, N. S., & Davis, G. (2010). Mental-state attribution drives rapid, reflexive gaze following. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 72(3), 695-705. We thank the reviewer very much for their enthusiastic feedback and their valuable input. As recommended, we included the argument in our discussion (page 32 line 730 and following): Parts of this complex process, such as deriving whether an agent can or cannot see based on previous experience with a blindfold, have been shown to occur on an automatic level in the simpler context of gaze following [39]. However, in the context of false belief situations, the process as a whole may have been too complex to function spontaneously. and also sharpened our conclusion (page 34 line 781-782): That is, we may spontaneously be influenced by the perspective of others if it can be grasped at an immediate perceptual level, such as in gaze following or visual perspective taking, but may not take their perspective or belief into account if it needs to be inferred in a cognitively more effortful way, for example, from one’s own experience about visual access We did not skip the entire argument, though, because we still believe that it is possible that inferring the belief of a person based on previous experience with a blindfold is cognitively more demanding than inferring whether or not a person can see through a blindfold in a simpler context like gaze following. Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: Response_to_Reviewers.docx https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0294136.r002
26 Oct 2023 Decision Letter - Joydeep Bhattacharya, Editor Evidence against implicit belief processing in a blindfold task PONE-D-23-03185R1 Dear Dr. Rothmaler, 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, Joydeep Bhattacharya Academic Editor PLOS ONE Additional Editor Comments (optional): Reviewers' comments: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0294136.r003
Formally Accepted
5 Nov 2023 Acceptance Letter - Joydeep Bhattacharya, Editor PONE-D-23-03185R1 Evidence against implicit belief processing in a blindfold task Dear Dr. Rothmaler: 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. Joydeep Bhattacharya Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0294136.r004

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