Elsevier Editorial System(tm) for Hearing Research Manuscript Draft ...

of the stimulation rates used, which is not mentioned in Viola et al 2011.
Reply: CI users were using their implant on their standard everyday settings. This information
has been added to the manuscript. The stimulation rates have been added to the table
requested by reviewer #2 (please see #18).
11) Line 192. How many repetitions for one averaged EPR?
Reply: For the ESS the number of trials (M ± SD) was 153.8 ± 2.7. For the TNS was 1562.8 ±
8.8. This information was added to the manuscript.
12) Line 218. 'had normal or corrected to normal vision'. Why is this relevant for this task?
Reply: The sentence has been deleted.
13) Fig. 1 - The light grey is very difficult to see. The black on the topographic maps is also
difficult to see. Please also show a representative waveform (from one or more electrodes)
before IC analysis.
Reply: Fig. 1 has been revised. Fig. 4 has been changed to include the information requested.
14) Fig. 3 -Please mark onset audio in all columns.
Reply: Fig. 3 has been revised accordingly.
Reviewer #2:
15a) A concern is the expected robustness of this procedure. The authors do a great job
discussing some of the limitations related to artifact identification (e.g., variance from device
type, etc.). However, in some cases, these issues could benefit from more detailed discussion
related to the algorithm itself. For example, would one expect to need different threshold
values depending on the device type, or stimulation strategy?
Reply: CIAC was developed to find ICs representing CI artifact across CI users, as long as
the auditory stimulation delivered across individuals is the same. Therefore we intentionally
designed a tool that does not require adjusting thresholds at a single subject level. We would
like to highlight that the CI users included in the study ESS used devices from different
manufactures, as well as different processors and speech coding strategies. The figure below
shows ICs selected by CIAC for 14 out of the 18 CI users. As can be seen, it is not possible to
associate a specific pattern to a specific device or processor. Even when all parameters are
identical, IC scalp maps differ. However note that all ICs have in common the fact that the
residual variances are never smaller than 25%. Moreover, as shown in Fig.1, included in the
manuscript, another common aspect is that the temporal derivative of the activation of these
ICs contains spikes associated to onset/offset of the CI artifact. Thus we used this
combination of temporal and spatial properties when we developed CIAC and we are
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