Mining Neuroscience Data for Social Campaign Evaluation

Modern technology allows to gather large amount of data. This applies to every aspect of life. Scientific research is not an exception in that matter. It is worth noting that this applies not only to the areas that have always been associated with a large amount of data (astronomy, weather forecasting, etc.), but also those that have only recently gained new possibilities of acquiring such quantities. These include social sciences primarily involving the collecting data from people and about people. They are no longer limited to surveys and interviews, but, using the new technologies, they go much deeper - not only to the conscious declarations of the participants, but also to their subconscious opinions and beliefs. In this context, cognitive neuroscience techniques appear. Thanks to the use of tools previously associated mainly with medicine, they allow you to gain new information on people’s preferences, feelings, unconscious opinions, etc. However, in order for this information to be extracted, data collected with the use of such tools must be treated with a number of algorithms that will help to extract what is most important. In order to achieve this, data mining methods are used. However, the conducted procedure must be adapted to the specifics of this data. The aim of the article is to characterize the data that is collected using the cognitive neuroscience techniques, presenting the following stages of its processing and analysis, and methods that are commonly used, so that it is possible to obtain valuable information that will allow the researchers to draw the right conclusions. Such procedure will be presented on the example of research on measuring the effectiveness of media messages in social campaigns.