Bayesian Semiparametric Functional Mixed Models for Serially Correlated Functional Data, with Application to Glaucoma Data.

Glaucoma, a leading cause of blindness, is characterized by optic nerve damage related to intraocular pressure (IOP), but its full etiology is unknown. Researchers at UAB have devised a custom device to measure scleral strain continuously around the eye under fixed levels of IOP, which here is used to assess how strain varies around the posterior pole, with IOP, and across glaucoma risk factors such as age. The hypothesis is that scleral strain decreases with age, which could alter biomechanics of the optic nerve head and cause damage that could eventually lead to glaucoma.

Lunching for Relaxation or Cognitive Control? After-Effects of Social and Solitary Meals.

Meals, especially when taken in company, may affect the diner's mood. In line with findings that mood may alter cognitive control, a previous study by the authors found that after solitary meals, the was diminished as compared to a premeal condition, whereas a social meal did not reduce the Simon effect. Here, we investigated whether this finding generalizes across different demands in cognitive control and, therefore, applied a flanker task.

Robust and Gaussian spatial functional regression models for analysis of event-related potentials.

Event-related potentials (ERPs) summarize electrophysiological brain response to specific stimuli. They can be considered as correlated functions of time with both spatial correlation across electrodes and nested correlations within subjects. Commonly used analytical methods for ERPs often focus on pre-determined extracted components and/or ignore the correlation among electrodes or subjects, which can miss important insights, and tend to be sensitive to outlying subjects, time points or electrodes.

Automatic quantitative analysis of ultrasound tongue contours via wavelet-based functional mixed models.

This paper illustrates the application of wavelet-based functional mixed models to automatic quantification of differences between tongue contours obtained through ultrasound imaging. The reliability of this method is demonstrated through the analysis of tongue positions recorded from a female and a male speaker at the onset of the vowels /a/ and /i/ produced in the context of the consonants /t/ and /k/. The proposed method allows detection of significant differences between configurations of the articulators that are visible in ultrasound images during the production of different speech gestures and is compatible with statistical designs containing both fixed and random terms.