<p>The manuscript presents a straightforward experiment assessing the role of overlearning and Ne/ERN signal when feedback is provided vs when it isn’t. The study seems interesting enough. However, the poor explanation about the procedure makes hard to follow and match what is later explained in the result section. I have the feeling that this experiment can contribute to the area, but the authors are underselling their work. I recommend expand and explain in better detail the manuscript to give it a fair shot. As it is, I am afraid I can not recommend its publication.</p>
<p><strong>General comment introduction:</strong> Since your topic is about overlearning, correct-response feedback and Ne/ERN. I suggest to concentrate your introduction in these 3 topics. Define those 3 and explain what it is known about each and if someone has stablished a connection before. It seems more relevant to talk about the specific tasks that have been used to asses Ne/ERN than about value/motivation, etc.</p>
<p><strong>Other comments about introduction:</strong></p>
<ol>
<li class="show">There is a big of a jump in the introduction from ERP and cognitive tasks and ERN and overlearning. Why overlearning specifically?</li>
<li class="show">The information about the role of ERN is somehow hard to follow, the information needs to be organized from general to particular and perhaps spend some more time explaining what do they mean by error or unfavorable results.</li>
<li class="show">Please explain what do you mean by precision level of a task. Accuracy, reaction time? It seems to be an essential variable in your study, give some more context to the reader. At the same time, please add some explanation about the following paragraph. Why is overlearning an inefficient strategy? How can it be more perseverative errors but better reversal learning performance?</li>
<li class="show">“Scheffers and Coles (2000) found that Ne/ERN varies with the perception of an imprecise behavior. The relationship between speed/precision and Ne/ERN suggests that this process is influenced by the importance given to errors by the participants: the greater the importance given, the stronger the Ne/ERN manifestation (Gehring Goss, Coles, Meyer, &amp; Donchin, 2018).” This means that it only changes when the subject gives ‘value’ to it? Could you observe this component with animals? How is imprecise equal to importance? It seems to me that many concepts are treated as synonyms. Don’t get me wrong, it can be that the literature is as confusing as it seems to be, but you need to explain those concepts and how they related to each other. So far it seems Ne/ERN account for several different concepts and situations. Then, what is this signal actually telling us about learning and the observed behavior.</li>
<li class="show">Be careful with the use of motivation, which is a concept on its own complications. If you don’t expand in this topic and if you don’t have clear ways to define and measure motivation, I suggest keep it out of your introduction.</li>
<li class="show">Please explain more the need/relevance if your study.</li>
</ol>
<p><strong>General method comment:</strong> There is many details missing that make impossible to understand the structure of the task, the criteria selected to pass to the next phase and the difference between group. Also, there is no mention to which data was recorded during training. I suggest adding a diagram of the task, it is common to see a drawing showing a trial example. You have another one for the second phase, but we need to understand what you did first. &nbsp;</p>
<p><strong>Other comments method section:</strong></p>
<ol>
<li class="show">How did the different N between groups happened? Did you have to exclude some subjects? Explain.</li>
<li class="show">“60 correct responses plus 30 correct practice trials in a row” What is the difference between those? You need to explain in better detail the structure of the task. How many trials, for how long, etc. Start explaining how many trials they have, total and type, explain each of them and how they are organized. Explain what is common to all group, and then add what is different about each of them.</li>
<li class="show">“Feedback was absent when subjects answered correctly. In conditions without over-learning and with correct/incorrect response feedback, aversive and rewarding sounds were present, without considering the 60 correct responses plus the 30 correct practice trials criteria. Under these conditions, only 10 trials were performed prior to electroencephalographic recording.” I don’t understand what happened in your task, what happened in each group and what was the criteria to move to next phase.</li>
<li class="show">“20 percent of stimuli were targets” what about the rest of the time?</li>
<li class="show">Explain what is the oddball method.</li>
<li class="show">Why did the screen, program, etc changed between conditions? It seems odd and it hurts your experiment (your subjects during phase 2 are having a different experience from phase 1). Please add reasoning.</li>
<li class="show">How can you use an ANOVA for comparison across all conditions, but a non-parametric for 2 conditions? Does your data follow or not a normal distribution? Also, wouldn’t be better to do post-hocs analysis based on your ANOVA? Also later, you use t-tests too.</li>
</ol>
<p><strong>General results:</strong> You need to indicate the type of analysis you are using before reporting the values. For instance, in behavioral performance you need to indicate the type of t-test used, before reporting the specific values. Add effect size to all your analysis. P values nowadays are reported p &lt; .001, otherwise you need to report the specific value. Overall, I think is very problematic how you switch between ANOVAs, t-test and not parametric analysis. If you are doing an ANOVA with all your factors, any further analysis needs to followed up under that big umbrella. If your data is not normal (sphericity test failed, etc), you need to correct accordingly. But you need to account for the error from different conditions. When you switch from your main ANOVA to do a specific t-test you are making more likely a small p-value, and ergo a significant effect because you are not correcting by the error across conditions. Of course, the analysis depends on your design, so I can’t suggest any specific since you did not describe in detail your procedure in the method section or your analysis and factors used here.</p>
<p><strong>Other comments result section</strong></p>
<ol>
<li class="show">This might be because your procedure was not clear enough, but why are you collapsing all groups? Group is a factor. It is very likely that there is no difference before your manipulation buy you need to assess it. Otherwise, any difference observed later can be due to differences in performance early in training.</li>
<li class="show">Even if you did not find difference in reaction times, or the number of errors, you need to report the stats.</li>
<li class="show">For your EEG data, you still need to report all the factors used in your two-way ANOVA. And All your conditions. If there is no effect you can collapse conditions, but only after you showed there were no difference. More details in the analysis are required.</li>
<li class="show">Figure 3 needs a level in the Y-axis. Also add error bars or 95% CI</li>
<li class="show">What is OL and WOL? You have not defined them before.</li>
<li class="show">Is DE standard deviation?</li>
<li class="show">“<em>M </em>= -4.54, <em>DE </em>= 1.95,<em> N</em> = 17), <em>d</em> = -.643.” I can’t tell which stats did you use here. Is this part a posthocs from your main ANOVA?</li>
</ol>
<p><strong>Discussion general comment.</strong> There is some new information about the emotional role of Ne/ERN that wasn’t mention before. Shouldn’t make sense to elaborate about in the introduction? Can your data actually control for this if you did not measure emotion?</p>
<p><strong>Other comments discussion section</strong></p>
<ol>
<li class="show">“It has been reported, although in participants who showed extremely low socialization scores that during avoidance-learning”. I don’t understand what you mean here.</li>
<li class="show">low-SO: I assume this is low-socialization. If so, you need to define first. Second, APA only recommend this abbreviation with a concept that you will use more than a few times across the manuscript. It does not seem to be the case here.</li>
<li class="show">“These authors found that there was a greater latency to respond after given incorrect responses in which Ne/ERN amplitude was greater. They also observed that errors due to premature responses are related to a greater Ne/ERN”. I think your discussion will be richer if you discuss your latency data.</li>
<li class="show">“Even though there are contradictory reports about the above”. This phrase is odd. Reports about previous statement?</li>
<li class="show">“However, there is a component referred to as error-positivity (Pe), which is related to the awareness of having made a mistake, as well as coping strategies, and with a subjective emotional evaluation of errors” I don’t follow the jump to this topic. Please clarify.</li>
<li class="show">“It was not in the purposes of the present study to analyze Pe, but future studies could investigate it in relation to the variables studied here.” Perhaps you want to relate better Pe with Ne? We need more background to follow your logic.</li>
</ol>
<p><strong>Minor aesthetic comments.</strong></p>
<ol>
<li class="show">I suggest to change format to the 7<sup>th</sup> For instance: if more than 2 authors you use et al.</li>
<li class="show">Page 2, ERN is used before it is define, change that.</li>
<li class="show">There is some missing commas, dots, and extra spaces around the document. Please check!</li>
</ol>