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What Is The Function Of The Regimen On The Start Changed Movement?

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I read this manuscript with interest and the results look interesting. The manuscript presents what seems a well conducted experiment. In the present study the authors investigated the impact of a 2-week training regimen on the facilitation of individuated finger movements by startling acoustic stimuli. To my knowledge, this is the second (see Maslovat et al., 2011) study to look at the effect of training over a relatively extended period of time on the StartReact effect. I rate this manuscript favourably but have several suggestions, particularly regarding the interpretation of the results, to improve the paper. Line 32-34: "Still, individuated movements of the hands are not susceptible to startle-evoked movement (SEM) which indicates …show more content…

Ready and Go signal are both auditory, thus referring to No Stimulus trials when you have a soft Go signal is misleading. Perhaps simply say soft and loud Go signals. Methods: I like short reports but for replication purposes it would be ideal to provide more details in the methods section. For example, was the loud sound delivered via the computer speakers? How did you measure the intensity of the acoustic stimuli? What is the duration of the acoustic stimulus? Rise time? An indication of the number of trials analysed and lost would be helpful too. What is LSCM? I can guess left SCM but you must spell it out the first time, and same for RSCM. Line 149-154: This is a bit confusing (perhaps just to me): "... an action is declared susceptible to SEM". Is the action susceptible to the startle-evoked movement? I would revise this throughout the whole paper. Line 161: You are hypothesizing a null-effect here. If you really want to do that, then you should use Bayesian statistics and collect data until you have strong evidence for the null. That's not how NHST works and with only 9 participants things are even more complicated. Confidence intervals and estimates of effect sizes would be preferred if you don't want to go Bayesian. Line 184: a p-value of p=0.09 does not indicate a trend. If you want to talk about a trend just fit a simple regression line to each individual's data across the testing days and see if the average slope is different from zero.

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