Are there oscillatory markers of pain intensity?

  The stage 2 manuscript mostly follows the outlines of the stage 1 manuscript. Different than initially planned, the stimulation hardly elicited painful sensations. Therefore, the title and the abstract have been changed to account for this lack of pain induction. Beyond that, the main finding is that high oddball stimuli elicited painful sensations and neural responses, which differed from baseline stimuli. In contrast, the low oddball stimuli did not. Thus, no definite conclusion can be drawn regarding the relationship between stimulus saliency, stimulus intensity, pain perception, and ongoing oscillations. 
 
The manuscript presents the results mostly clearly and discusses the findings extensively. Some revisions might further improve the manuscript:
 
1.     Title and abstract. Unlike initially planned, the stimulation hardly elicited painful sensations, which changed the title and the abstract from pain perception to thermonociception. I’m wondering whether this tacit focus change is in accordance with the idea of a registered report. The authors might consider presenting and explaining this change in the abstract.
 
2.     Results. The presentation of the results does not clearly relate them to the hypothesis table. I understand the hypothesis table as a core part of a registered report that should guide the analysis and interpretation. Thus, the authors should explicitly relate the findings to the hypothesis table.
 
3.     Discussion. The discussion is quite long and discusses many details of the paradigm, but the results and their interpretation are less discussed along the hypothesis table. The authors might significantly shorten the discussion and change the focus from discussing methodological details to the main topic and the interpretation of the main results.

Let me first say that I am excited that the results are in! Thank you for a well thought-out and informative study, it’s been a pleasure accompanying this process.

In the following, page numbers refer to the clean PDF. All comments are rather minor, but I would strongly argue for a re-reading of the discussion that seems a bit frayed occasionally.

GENERAL COMMENTS
- The abstract does not mention the (final) sample size which seems like a relevant information for me; furthermore, it is not clear from the descriptions in 2.1 versus 3. whether the final sample size is 35 or 33 (for behavioral data) and 31 (for EEG data), respectively - or if the sample was expanded considering the drop-outs
- 3.1, paragraph 1: The authors suggest to "see Supplementary Material for single subject average examples"; later it more specifically points to "see Supplementary Materials S.IV for single subject average examples"; however, that section seems not to exist, at least not in the two PDFs provided (RR_Saliency Stage II_clean, RR_Saliency Stage II_marked)
- 3.1, paragraph 2: It is quite surprising that the (ostensibly) high temperatures employed did not yield robust pain; it would be an interesting data point exactly what these temperatures were, so could the authors provide at least the descriptives (calibrated mean±SD), at best a plot showing perception threshold, pain threshold, and max temperature (possibly akin to Fig 5)? This may seem pedantic at this point, but I feel it’s pertinent given that the thermal stimulation seems to have been one of the big issues during actual empiry.
- 3.3.2, line 7, “considering the first  two harmonics in the high oddball condition” is unfortunately phrased, you mean “including the first two harmonics…” (in addition to the oddball frequency itself), right? So FOSagg is 0.125+0.25+0.375, not just 0.25+0.375. This confusion also exists on p. 35, line 2 (it’s activity at the first 2 harmonics AND the oddball frequency).
- 4.1, the high oddball supposedly was “the only stimulation that was consistently perceived as painful” seems to be a stretch: Fig 5 and the top mean±SD of 5.5±2.4 VAS (5 being pain threshold) clearly indicate that large portions of the sample did not in fact perceive them as painful. I suggest replacing “consistently” with “on average”. 
- Parts of the discussion have a rushed feel and should be revisited, e.g. 
- p. 32 line 7f., “known to be the primarily” => do you mean primary contributors/afferents/some such notion?
- p. 32 I would think it’s a “heat sink-effect”, not a “heat sink”? Also use “larger” instead of “worse”?
- p. 32 remove the “, which” after “Wang et al. (2022)”
- p. 34 “… following the oddball stimulation in the low oddball condition”, the wording here and in the following is a bit ambiguous and you shift from referencing high oddball/low oddball/unspecified oddball results; can you revisit this?
- All heat sink-related or neuronal temporal filtering aside (enjoyable as the discussion is), it seems to me that another explanation of high oddball-salience and the absence of low oddball-salience is simply that only the high oddball recruited nociceptors to begin with. Hypothetically, assuming an absence of pain perception for the baseline stimulus (VAS 4.6/VAS 5.0 depending on calculation) chiefly due to an absence of nociceptive drive, the high oddball-related temperature increase might have pushed the stimulus above the pain threshold, leading to a discrete and very salient percept (as in, a new sensory modality arises), whereas baseline/low oddball fluctuations all remain within the non-noxious heat range. This interpretation is tempered, of course, by the fact that roughly half the sample would have actually perceived the baseline peaks as painful (>5.0), as well, without modality-related salience of the high oddball.
- Another alternative interpretation the authors may or may not want to explore is an accumulating offset effects from the downward slopes, maybe fostering a larger antinociceptive tone of the descending modulation (they already point to the comparatively short time spent "at peak", by nature of the stimulation).

MINOR FORMAL ISSUES
- p. 23 has at least 2 FOSoddball subscript issues
- p. 29 line 5 subscript period [sub].[/sub]
- p. 31 probably => probable