Michotte’s classic studies on the perception of causality: Replications, extensions and a sound base for further research

January 20, 2025

Dear Peter,

Thank you for submitting your revised Stage 2 manuscript, “Michotte's research on perceptual impressions of causality: A registered replication study” to PCI RR.

I appreciate your close attention to my previous feedback. There are only a few very minor issues to address before I can issue a recommendation:

1.      Replace all of the OSF view-only links with the public links.

2.      Prepare a clean copy, with no tracked changes.

3.      You had asked whether the Design Table should continue to be included. Yes, please continue to include it, and also add a new column at the end that indicates the outcome for each hypothesis in basic terms (e.g., confirmed or disconfirmed). This is PCI RR policy and is something I forgot to include in my previous letter.

4.      My previous concern about ‘clearly delineated columns” in the tables seems to have been addressed via the change to single spacing, so there is nothing further for you to do there.

5.      Consider converting the manuscript to PDF and posting that version as your updated preprint. Doing so better preserves formatting, which is helpful for anyone reading the paper online.

I agree that you have done the best you can with the length, given the scope and complexities of the project. I sincerely hope that you are able to secure the necessary funds to publish the paper in your preferred outlet, and encourage you to explore the various fee waiver programs that are available.

Thank you for submitting your work to PCI RR, and I look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Moin Syed

PCI RR Recommender

December 11, 2024

Dear Author,

Thank you for submitting your Stage 2 manuscript, “Michotte's research on perceptual impressions of causality: A registered replication study” to PCI RR.

I apologize for the delay in sending this decision. As you well know, your manuscript contains numerous experiments that produced a large amount of data. I was fortunate to have the same reviewers for the Stage 2 manuscript as who were involved in the Stage 1 review process. Their comments are appended below.

Overall, you have prepared an excellent and extremely thorough Stage 2 manuscript. You held closely to the plans outlined in the Stage 1 that received the IPA, reported the results clearly, and interpreted the results appropriately. I have just a few comments, which could be interpreted as either small or large issues, depending on how you look at them.

1.      The manuscript is extremely long and detailed. I don’t usually raise this issue in the review process, because it is not relevant to the decision, but I wondered what your plans were for the paper following recommendation. If you intend to have it live as a reviewed preprint, or publish it directly into the Peer Community Journal, then the length is not a major issue. If, however, you want to publish it in a traditional journal, you will most certainly want to reduce the length considerably, moving much of the detail to supplemental. The choice, of course, is yours, but I felt it was worth raising for your consideration. I am happy to have a dialogue with you about this issue.

2.      I agree with Reviewer 1 that some visual representation of the findings would help quite a lot with clarity and communication. I understand your concern about misinterpretation of figures, but the root cause of that is poorly prepared figures, not figures themselves. You could provide nice, clear, detailed plots of the data that accurately represent the findings, and the paper would be much improved. This is an excellent contribution to the literature, and having some figures would clearly communicate the contributions to a broad audience.

3.      I recommend rewriting the abstract. The current version is heavily focused on the rationale, with little detail on the findings. The final version should have more balance and communicate the main findings of the project with more detail than what is currently included.

4.      Some of the tables could use stronger formatting. Tables 1-3, in particular would benefit from single-spacing and clear delineating of columns. Table 45, the summary of the replications, is extremely helpful but also difficult to parse. Again, having clearly delineated columns would help quite a bit.

5.      A small point, but more time consuming given the number of tests: you report “ns” for tests that were not statistically significant, but it is preferable (and current APA style) to provide exact p-values for all tests.

Thank you for submitting your work to PCI RR, and I look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Moin Syed

PCI RR Recommender