I apologize for the rudimentary nature of this question. I feel like I should know this by know, but I could use a little help in explaining what the most correct or most accepted standard is for publishable fMRI statistics. In my current study, I have three conditions of interest I am looking at (novel words, group1 words, and groups2 words). I want to compare these three conditions to one another. At the first level, I created contrasts for each of these conditions for each of my subjects. Then at the second level, I did a one way ANOVA. I was also told that I could alternatively just do ttests at the second level to compare my three conditions to each other. Then I could do masking analyses where I mask out one condition from another instead of doing a subtraction type contrast through the ANOVA. My question is, which of these analyses is the most correct and accepted way to look at comparisons of this sort? Is it acceptable to use masking to look at differences in activation between two different ttests, or is this poor practice? Is the ANOVA the more acceptable way to go? Lastly, if it is ok to do these types of masking comparisons, what should the uncorrected mask p-value be set at? Is the .05 default fine, or should I use an uncorrected mask p-value of .001 in addition to p-value control threshold of .001 uncorrected?