Confirming an antiphasic bicyclic pattern of forward entrainment in signal detection: a reanalysis of Sun et al. (2021)

Forward entrainment refers to that part of the entrainment process that persists after termination of an entraining stimulus.  Hickok et al. (DOI: 10.1177/0956797615576533) reported forward entrainment in signal detection that lasted for two post-stimulus cycles.  In a recent paper, Sun et al. (DOI: 10.1111/ejn.15367) reported new data which suggested an absence of entrainment effects.  Here we show that when Sun et al.’s data are analyzed using unbiased detection-theoretic measures, an antiphasic bicyclic pattern of entrainment is observed. We further show that the measure of entrainment strength used by Sun et al., i.e., the normalized Fourier transform of performance curves, is not only erroneously calculated but is unreliable in estimating entrainment strength due to signal processing artifacts.