Wooden Indoor Environments’ Restorativeness

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

I read your manuscript with great interest. I am impressed that your study is well designed and has appropriate results. However, there are a few, but seirous, problems with your manuscript. Please revise your manuscript in accordance with my comments or suggestions.

1. line 24: What is “drawing variability”?

2. line 38: Ikey et al. -> Ikei et al.

3. lines 62-71 and Figure 1: Why and how did you choose these nine specimens? I do not believe that these materials are necessarily the most common and popular interior finishing materials. And why did you not allign the longitudinal (fiber) direction of wooden specimens?

4. line 119: What is “SDq”? Semantic Differential Questionnaire?

5. line 120: the level of probability -> significant level?

6. lines 124-128: You state that you conducted your experiment in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki, but what specific experimental ethical procedures did you follow? Did you obtain aprroval to conduct the experiment from the university‘s research ethics committee? Have you obtained written informed consent from the participants and their agreement to participate in your experiment? 

7. lines 129-140 and Figure 2: Why did you change the exteriors of the two experimental rooms? Wouldn’t this give the participants undesirable preconceptions or psyhocological evaluation biases?

8. lines 163-174:

8.1 Only in this paragraph, the participants were called “volunteers”. Why?

8.2 lines 168-169: What are “the restorative room” and “the non-restorative room”? Judging from the context, I think the former is a wood room and the latter is a not-wood room. Am I right? If so, why did you make such determination? Some participants may restorate in the not-wood room. I think the experimenters for such a study should not be prejudiced.

8.3 line 171: What is “the testing room”? This means the wood room or the not-wood room?

8.4 lines 172-173: After a short stay in a wood room and a not-wood room and performing SART tasks in both, participants evaluated both rooms subjectively using the SD method. Am I right? If so, the subjects would unconciously compare both rooms and it may bias the sensory evaluation for each room. Is that OK? 

8.5 I recommend the authors to make a new figure of the experimental protocol chart. This will help readers to understand the flow of your experiment using many participants.

9. lines 175-184:

9.1 line 177: You should explain the D-Prime value briefly. Many readers will be unfamiliar with such a statistical value.

9.2 lines 179-182: Unfortunately, I could not understand what WNW, WWW, NWN, and NNN meant.

I imagined that following. Divide the participants into 6 groups, G1-G6; Each group would contain two sets of results (wood room W and not-wood room N); G1 would contain W1 and N1, G2 would contain W2 and N2, and so on. These data are shuffled as W1+W2+W3 (WWW), W4+N1+W5 (WNW), N2+W6+N3 (NWN), and N4+N5+N6 (NNN) to obtain four groups. Am I right?

To recognize Table 3 appropriately, it is needed  to explain the detail of such grouping process, I think. And it is also needed to show how many participants (or data) were involved in each group.

10. Table 1: There is no explanation of what the numbers in parentheses mean. The numbers shown in Table 1 are completely unreliable because the significant figures for the numbers areunsuitable.

11. line 235: an univariate ANOVA -> one way ANOVA?

12. I recommend the authors to add the section for Limitation. For example: Only nine materials were prepared to select the most preferred and lease preferred materials, and only 22 participants selected these materials. These numbers are insufficient for universality, I think.

 

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The overall design of this paper is more subjective, and it lacks the quantitative test of the changes of human emotions and minds by instruments. In the future, more detailed analysis is needed, and more materials and environmental factors are considered.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

• The problem addressed is not an important one. The paper include a clear statement of aims but not for hypotheses.
•  The strengths and weaknesses of the method are not reffered. The statistical analyses is appropriate.
• The results are presented clearly, accurately, but is necessary to include more details  
• There isnt appropriate discussion of study aims, methods, and findings in the context of the extant literature and the strengths and limitations are not adequately addressed
• The paper  is clearly organized and the use of  tables, and figures  are appropriate
• The authors have overlooked some key literature but for my point o view it is crucial to enrich the muniscript 

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 3 Report

The new version of the manuscript after the first revision is significantly improved. Many of the comments and remarks were successfully considered, and included in the rewritting and reorganizing of the manuscript. Before the continuation of the publishing process, it is suggested minor revision.