Recommendation
based on reviews by Chris Chambers and 1 anonymous reviewer
DOI or URL of the report: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.11.02.620526v1
Version of the report: 1
, posted 13 Jan 2025, validated 13 Jan 2025Dear Tara Rasmussen,
Happy new year and my apologies for being so late in getting back to you. Thank you for submitting your Stage 2 manuscript, which stays true to your Stage 1 protocol and presents an interesting and rigourous study. I have received reviews on your Stage 2 submission from two of the original reviewers and as you'll see they're very enthusiastic, as am I. The two reviewers only have very minor suggestions for the discussion, to add titles to Fig 6, and for mapping the results back to the hypotheses.
I look forward to receiving your revised manuscript
Best wishes
Maxine
The study reported no significant effect of HD-tDCS on thought modulation but highlighted a potential link between dopamine availability and reduced mind wandering. While the findings were comprehensive, I have a question for the discussion. The authors emphasized task sensitivity for internal thoughts, yet HD-tDCS showed no effect on task performance. Could varying task difficulty levels increase the likelihood of observing HD-tDCS effects? Are there studies that explore this relationship? Are there methodological challenges in designing tasks with varying difficulty within subject for HD-tDCS?
Minor suggestions:
, 25 Nov 2024This is an excellent Stage 2 submission that in my view meets the evaluation criteria in its current state. The authors stayed close to their approved protocol and the reporting is very clear throughout, with a sensible and insightful discussion.
Even though evaluation of study rigour is not part of the Stage 2 assessment (being already covered at Stage 1), in reading the manuscript again I am reminded just how careful and thorough it was in the consideration of blinding, sample size planning, and a range of other design characteristics. This is a model approach for the application of tDCS that I hope other researchers follow.
I have one very minor suggestion: in the study design table, it would great to add a column to the far right called "Observed outcome" which states for each cell, very simply, whether the hypothesis was supported or not supported (based strictly on whether the results for that test met the preregistered inference criteria). For a complex study with many hypotheses, the inclusion of this additional column will provide a useful overview for readers and will make the outcomes easier to summarise in future SRs/meta-analyses.
Otherwise, I feel this manuscript makes an important contribution and would be happy for it to receive a positive recommendation.
