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Related fixed and random factors and planned comparisons in a 2x2 design

In terms of contrast coding, two more helpful resources are:

http://talklab.psy.gla.ac.uk/tvw/catpred/

http://palday.bitbucket.org/stats/coding.html

Channel makes sense as a random effect / grouping term for your particular design, *not* nested within participant. The implicit crossing given by (1|Participant) + (1|Channel) models [omitting any slope terms to focus on the grouping variables] (1) interindividual differences in the EEG and (2) differences between electrodes because closely located electrodes can be thought of as samples from a population consisting of a given Region of Interest (ROI), especially if the electrode placement is somewhat symmetric. The differences resulting from variance in electrode placement between participants will be covered by the implicit crossing of these two random effects. 

Note that using channel as a random effect is somewhat more difficult if you're doing a whole scalp analysis as sampling across the whole scalp can be viewed as sampling from multiple ROIs, i.e. multiple populations. Two possible solutions are (1) to include ROI in the fixed effects and keep channel in the random effects and (2) model channel as a two or three continuous spatial variables (e.g. displacement from midline or displacement from center based on 10-20 coordinates, or spatial coordinates of the sort used in source localisation) in the fixed effects.  In the case of (1), the channel random effect would then be modelling the typical variance within ROIs (because that's hopefully the major source of variance structured  by channel left over after modelling ROI and your experimental manipulation). If this within-variance differs greatly between between ROIs, then this may be a sub-optimal modelling choice. In the case of (2), it might still make sense to additionally model channel as a random effect (i.e. the RE with the factor consisting of channel names, the FE with the continuous coordinates), see Thierry Onkelinx's posts on the subject and http://rpubs.com/INBOstats/both_fixed_random , but I haven't thought about this enough nor examined the resulting model fits.

Best,
Phillip

-----Original Message-----
From: R-sig-mixed-models [mailto:r-sig-mixed-models-bounces at r-project.org] On Behalf Of paul
Sent: Tuesday, 7 June 2016 5:27 AM
To: Houslay, Tom <T.Houslay at exeter.ac.uk>
Cc: r-sig-mixed-models at r-project.org
Subject: Re: [R-sig-ME] Related fixed and random factors and planned comparisons in a 2x2 design

Dear Tom,

Thank you so much for these detailed replies and I appreciate your help!

Sincerely,

Paul

2016-06-06 21:51 GMT+02:00 Houslay, Tom <T.Houslay at exeter.ac.uk>:
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