An EEG Investigation of the Brain Activities in a Creative Design Task
An EEG Investigation of the Brain Activities in a Creative Design Task
By Cheng-Hung Lo , Department of Industrial Design Chang Gung University, Taiwan
Kuo-Jung Hsieh, Department of Industrial Design Chang Gung University, Taiwan
Wen-Ko Chiou , Department of Industrial Design Chang Gung University, Taiwan
Jean-Lon Chen, Chang Gung Memorial Hospital, Taiwan
Background: Creativity is an essential element in Art and Design-related tasks/activities.
In the field of Creative Design, however, the creativity of an individual are often judged with subjective ratings or opinions of domain experts.
The lack of a more scientific measure of this essential element motivate us to look into the brain mechanisms of creativity, in particular the differences between those individuals with a higher creativity and those with less.
Early EEG studies demonstrated that highly creative individuals differed from normal controls in greater activity within right parietotemporal areas and higher alpha activity during analogs of “inspiration”.
They are also related to increased centroparietal interhemispheric connectivity and greater right hemisphere interconnectivity (Razoumnikova 2000).
A more recent study, on the other hand, finds a lower level of cortical arousal during creative problem solving and stronger alpha synchronization in centroparietal cortices associated with more original responses (Fink & Neubauer 2006).
This work aims to study whether these phenomena can also be found in the individuals performing a creative design task.
Methods: We designed an icon generation task. The subjects were requested to design an icon representing a “dressing room”.
They were instructed to not use any text in their designs. The participants were encouraged to sketch out as more of his ideas as possible.
The design process was also monitored and recorded using a digital video camera. Each subject was given 10 minutes to generate the icons.
Results, Discussion and Conclusions: So far we have carried out the experiment with four subjects recruited from the junior students in our department.
They were selected based on their performance in the design sketch classes.
Two of them exhibit a better sketch ability and confidence in the classes while the other two have difficulties in handling the sketch task and often find themselves struggling with the course assignments.
In this preliminary report, we select each one of the two categories of subjects and perform an initial independent component analysis (ICA) of their brain activity patterns. The similar results of our initial findings and those of Fink et al are shown in our figures.
References:
Fink A, Grabner RH, Benedek M, Reishofer G, Hauswirth V, et al. 2009. The creative brain: Investigation of brain activity during creative problem solving by means of EEG and FMRI. Human Brain Mapping 30:734-48
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