Spontaneous analogising caused by text stimuli in design thinking: differences between higher- and lower-creativity groups

Abstract

Understanding the cognitive processes used in creative practices is essential to design research. In this study, electroencephalography was applied to investigate the brain activations of visual designers when they responded to various types of word stimuli during design thinking. Thirty visual designers were recruited, with the top third and bottom third of the participants divided into high-creativity (HC) and low-creativity (LC) groups. The word stimuli used in this study were two short poems, adjectives with similar meanings, and adjectives with opposing meanings. The derived results are outlined as follows: (1) the brain activations of the designers increased in the frontal and right temporal regions and decreased in the right prefrontal region; (2) the negative association between the right temporal and middle frontal regions was notable; (3) the differences in activations caused by distinct word stimuli varied between HC and LC designers; (4) the spectral power in the middle frontal region of HC designers was lower than that of LC designers during the short love poem task; (5) the spectral power in the bilateral temporal regions of HC designers was higher than that of LC designers during the short autumn poem task; (6) the spectral power in the frontoparietal region of HC designers was lower than that of LC designers during the similar concept task; and (7) the spectral power in the frontoparietal and left frontotemporal regions of HC designers was higher than that of LC designers during the opposing concept task.

Biometric Analysis in Design Cognition Studies: A Systematic Literature Review

“…Researchers have utilised biometric measurement to study the impact of various types of stimuli on design creativity. For instance, various brain activities and differences caused by distinct word stimuli were found between high and low creativity groups of designers based on EEG measurement [76]. Similarly, an EEG-utilising study suggested that the involvement of text in idea generation had an positive impact on design creativity and idea generation [77].…”

Eeg Variations as a Proxy of the Quality of the Design Outcome

“…Also, the inhibitory state can play an active (inhibitory) role in gating the transfer of information in specific neuronal pathways (Lopes da Silva, 1991). As creativity is a crucial skill of a designer, its understanding and empowerment via EEG metrics already gathered interest in the field (Jaarsveld et al, 2015;Liu et al, 2018) despite it being still at a preliminary stage. EEG variation, especially the model based on ERS/ERD, already provides different possibilities in clinical diagnosis (Pfurtscheller and Silva, 2017), decision-making prediction (Ratcliff et al, 2009), emotion detection (Lan et al, 2016) and other human-machine interface applications (Foldes and Taylor, 2013).…”

Effect of musical stimuli on design thinking: Differences between expert and student designers

“…Low-and high-pass filters with cutoff frequencies of 50 and 1 Hz, respectively, were applied to all signals based on finite-impulse-response filters to remove the line noise, muscle movement contamination, oculomotor activities, and direct-current drift. The 90-s EEG signals of each condition were divided into 1.6-s epochs based on previous studies Liu, Chang, Yang, & Liang, 2018;Wang, Jung, & Lin, 2015). Several epochs were rejected manually due to electrical artefacts.…”