I conducted an experiment in which participants listened to sentences while looking at pictures about the sentences on a computer screen. Whether at a given time point a participant looked at the left half of a picture or the right half of a picture was recorded via an eye-tracker.
The study had a 2 by 2 within subjects and within items design. If time was not an issue here, I could use the model below (using R
code). (Here, I assume varying random intercepts and random slopes for both subject and item.)
lmer(look ~ iv1 * iv2 + (1 + iv1*iv2 | subject) + (1 + iv1*iv2 | item),
family = "binomial", data=data)
However, given that participants listened to sentences each of which lasted a few seconds, where they looked at (left vs. right) would vary across time. So one way to model time might be to include time
as a covariate (it may even be necessary to natural polynomials):
lmer(look ~ iv1 * iv2 + time + (1 + iv1*iv2 | subject) + (1 + iv1*iv2 | item),
family = "binomial", data=data)
But things get complicated since (1) it is possible that time
interacts v1
and v2
and (2) I probably need to somehow model time
in the random effect terms. An additional complication is that eye-tracking data is fairly large. The particular set of data that I am working with currently has 5 million rows, so running even the simplest multilevel logistic regression can be fairly time consuming.
So my question is, given my design, what would be a good way to model time.
iv1
andiv2
? Maybe I am looking it in a wrong way, but are you sure you need this random effect structure? (aside the "keeping it maximal" rationale) You allow for correlation between the intercept deviations ofitem
(orsubject
) and theiv1*iv2
effect deviations within the levels ofitem
. Those are a lot of parameters... Maybe just(time| item)
(andsubject
obviously) are enough to test your assumptions? (time
and1 + time
are equivalent specifications by the way) Check your model residuals. $\endgroup$