The two main functionalities of afex are (1) to provide a coherent and intuitive interface to run standard ANOVAs with any number of within- or between-subjects variables (the relevant functions are now called aov_car, aov_ez, and aov_4) and (2) to provide p-values for fixed effects in mixed models using lme4 via function mixed. The default outputs of those functions can be directly passed to lsmeans for post-hoc tests or contrasts.

• afex is available from CRAN so the current stable version can be installed directly via: install.packages("afex")

• To install the latest development version you will need the devtools package: devtools::install_github("singmann/afex@master")

As of version 0.14 several changes to the interface were introduced:

• ANOVA functions renamed to aov_car, aov_ez, and aov_4. Old ANOVA functions are now deprecated.

• new default return argument for ANOVA functions afex_aov, an S3 object containing the following:

  1. ANOVA table of class "anova"
  2. ANOVA fitted with base R's aov (can be passed to lsmeans for post-hoc tests)
  3. output from car::Anova (for tests of effects), ANOVA table 1. is based on this model
  4. lm object passed to car::Anova
  5. data used for estimating 2. and 4.

• added support for lsmeans: objects of class afex_aov can be passed to lsmeans directly. afex now depends on lsmeans.

• added three new real example data sets and a vignette showing how to calculate contrasts after ANOVA.

• added expand_re argument to mixed which, if TRUE, correctly interprets the || notation in random effects with factors (i.e., suppresses estimation of correlation among random effects). lmer_alt is a wrapper for mixed which uses expand_re = TRUE, returns an object of class merMod (i.e., does not calculate p-values), and otherwise behaves like g/lmer (i.e., does not enforce certain contrasts)

• nice.anova was renamed to nice (and now also works with mixed objects).

• Returned objects of mixed and the ANOVA functions (i.e., of class afex_aov) are similar:

  • Both have a numeric Anova table as first element called anova_table (which is of class c("anova", "data.frame")).
  • calling nice on either returns a nicely rounded Anova table (i.e., numbers converted to characters). This table is also per default printed.
  • calling anova on either will return the numeric Anova table (for which print methods exist as well).

• added afex_options() functionality for setting options globally.

• afex does not depend on car package anymore, it is only imported.

• first element in mixed object renamed to anova_table.

• summary method for mixed objects now calls summary.merMod on full model.