Congratulations, if you find yourself here, it is likely you have run an experience and are now working with the results! You are well on your way to becoming a neuroscience expert. While navigating the platform and viewing results, you will see an option to export the data into an excel spreadsheet. The excel export will provide you with second-by-second immersion output for every participant. This export allows neuroscientists like yourself to work with the data more freely! Some users utilize this feature to create custom graphs, others to run further analyses. Whatever reason you find yourself exporting this data for, we feel it is important to note that you may see differences when comparing platform data and exported data. Let us explain why.
The immersion score you see and work with at all levels is actually an index of our raw immersion value. When you begin running calculations with these indexed values (the ones in the excel sheet), you may notice a slight discrepancy from the calculated measures you see on the platform.
This discrepancy is because our platform applies our own proprietary formula to index the values after calculating the averages from the raw immersion. While your calculations are done with data that was already indexed using our proprietary formula.
If you find the calculations of average immersion from the exported data are not exactly matching the platform values, do not fret. The graph shapes and rank orderings are still the same. The key takeaway here is to choose one place to calculate your measures. Either use the pre-calculated values the platform provides, or calculate your own using the excel values.
No matter where you choose to take your values from, you can be confident that the graph shapes and rank orderings of the immersion scores will be representative of the calculations. The trends of the data remain the same in both formats.
So why does our platform use a proprietary formula for its calculations?
It actually requires a dive into Immersion history to answer that. When we began our calculations, we used an immersion score ranking from 0-10. This scale meant that in calculating average immersion a difference as seemingly small as 3-4 points can actually be statistically significant. However, to most individuals who do not have an in-depth statistical knowledge, this difference seems insignificant. So we developed a proprietary formula to convert this 0-10 raw immersion ranking to an indexed immersion score on a scale of 0-100. This way, larger differences exist between average immersion scores to highlight the differences in immersion scores.
Please click below to learn more about calculations or the differences between raw immersion scores and our indexed immersion measure. We would love to geek out about the science with you!