Peer review of: The effect of military training on the sense of agency and outcome processing (2020)



**REVIEWERS' COMMENTS: 

Reviewer #1 (Remarks to the Author): 

I thank the authors for their efforts in revising the ms of this impressive study. The data have become 
even more relevant considering that the entire world seems to be currently living under CoV-2 related 
coercion. The revised manuscript is much improved, although it is unfortunate that there are no 
explicit agency judgements. The discussion of the other points is also improved. Happy to accept the 
paper in its current form. 

Reviewer #2 (Remarks to the Author): 

Comments to the authors - NCOMMS-19-19198B 

I appreciate the authors’ efforts to revise and resubmit their manuscript a second time. In sum, it is 
now clearer which questions are within the scope of the manuscript, and which are not or still unclear 
in the literature on sense of agency and outcome processing. I will detail my take on a few more 
specific points below. 

Centrally, the paper finds that (extreme forms of) social hierarchies can potentially alter both outcome 
processing and sense of agency under coercion. In principle, the assignment of study participants to 
the different groups does not satisfy the requirements of an experimental protocol, since – for obvious 
reasons – a random group assignment was not possible. Yet, the authors have performed several 
additional analyses and thus, as far as the study design permits, it may be assumed that the reported 
effects are in fact due to military training, and not self-selection or other processes. 

It is now also clearer that the reported findings on intentional binding and the N1 reflect two different 
(although potentially somehow related) processes, namely implicit sense of agency (SoA) and 
outcome processing. Related to concerns raised by the other reviewer and to methodological reasons 
of the present study, it is not yet clear if and how implicit SoA is linked to explicit responsibility ratings 
on a trial-by-trial basis. Neither does the article provide correlational evidence linking these processes 
to outcome processing. This link, however, is not the focus of the manuscript and I felt that this was 
less clear before. I appreciate the additional clarifications and analyses now provided by the authors 
that in my opinion help to understand which questions are, and which aren't, focused by the presented 
studies. 

Last, and in relation to a point raised by the other reviewer, the authors now discuss in more detail 
that the N1 component is known to be susceptible to other factors such as motor functions, cognitive 
processes such as attention, or education, to name a few, and argue why they believe that these 
factors are unlikely to have caused the observed effects. In my opinion, the manuscript has been 
improved by providing some references to the EEG literature and discussions of potential confounds 
that were missing in earlier drafts. It has thus become more transparent which potential confounds 
could have affected the EEG findings, and the authors’ arguments against the possible influence of 
such effects is now explicit, and in my view sound. 

With respect to the topographical EEG plots, I was somewhat surprised that they are now completely 
deleted (and as I take it will not be presented in the supplements either?). I assume that this decision 
was based on the other reviewer’s position regarding these plots in addition to my suggestion to 
reduce their size or move them to the supplements. I would in fact encourage the authors to not 

delete these plots entirely, but provide them in the supplementary information, just not as 
prominently as they appeared before within the main manuscript. In case my previous statement in 
this regard was misleading, I would like to apologize for being unclear. 

The questions targeted in the are very important with regard to ethical and juridical concepts of 
responsibility for own actions, fundamental philosophical concepts of selfhood, and also in front of the 
historical and political background of the Nürnberg trials that the authors allude to. It is thus 
interesting to see that both implicit sense of agency and outcome processing under coercion seem to 
be susceptible to military training, although their exact interdependence remains to be clarified by 
future studies. 

Best regards, 
David S Stolz