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1. BRAIN ACTIVITY IN CONSTRAINED AND OPEN DESIGN SPACES: AN EEG STUDY

   https://doi.org/10.35199/ICDC.2020.09  

   Vieira, Sonia; Gero, John S.; Delmoral, Jessica; Li, Shumin; Cascini, Gaetano; Fernandes, António (April 2020, The Sixth International Conference on Design Creativity-ICDC2020)

   Boujet, J-F (Ed.)

   Design space is a common abstraction in design research used in the investigation of design cognition. Although its usefulness has been alleged and has contributed to the knowledge about designing, characteristics and properties of design spaces and how they change while designing are underexplored. Creativity has been recognized as an essential skill for changing the design space from constrained to open spaces. We analyzed the brain activity of designers while performing constrained and open design tasks. This study investigates the neurophysiological activations of professional mechanical engineers and industrial designers in two prototypical design tasks, a problem-solving constrained layout task and an open design sketching task. The analysis focused on comparing the neurophysiological activations of the cognitive demand in three stages of categorical similarity of designing in constrained and open design spaces. Results indicate significant differences of frequency bands activations between stages of the design spaces across and between domains. In particular, the stage of reflecting evoked visual imagination and associative reasoning modes and revealed significant differences in beta bands from the problem-solving stage leading to expanded activation in the sketching stage, which translates in higher activation in the open design task with significant differences in upper alpha and beta bands. We propose the neurophysiological activations as a measure of the pliability of design spaces. 

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2. The neurophysiological activations of mechanical engineers and industrial designers while designing and problem-solving

   https://doi.org/10.1017/dsj.2020.26  

   Vieira, Sonia; Gero, John S.; Delmoral, Jessica; Gattol, Valentin; Fernandes, Carlos; Parente, Marco; Fernandes, António A. (January 2020, Design Science)

   null (Ed.)

   Abstract This paper presents results from an experiment using electroencephalography to measure neurophysiological activations of mechanical engineers and industrial designers when designing and problem-solving. In this study, we adopted and then extended the tasks described in a previous functional magnetic resonance imaging study reported in the literature. The block experiment consists of a sequence of three tasks: problem-solving, basic design and open design using a physical interface. The block is preceded by a familiarizing pre-task and then extended to a fourth open design task using free-hand sketching. This paper presents the neurophysiological results from 36 experimental sessions of mechanical engineers and industrial designers. Results indicate significant differences in activations between the problem-solving and the open design tasks. The paper focuses on the two prototypical tasks of problem-solving layout and open design sketching and presents results for both aggregate and temporal activations across participants within each domain and across domains. 

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3. Characterization of the Stages of Creative Writing With Mobile EEG Using Generalized Partial Directed Coherence

   https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2020.577651  

   Cruz-Garza, Jesus G.; Sujatha Ravindran, Akshay; Kopteva, Anastasiya E.; Rivera Garza, Cristina; Contreras-Vidal, Jose L. (December 2020, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience)

   null (Ed.)

   Two stages of the creative writing process were characterized through mobile scalp electroencephalography (EEG) in a 16-week creative writing workshop. Portable dry EEG systems (four channels: TP09, AF07, AF08, TP10) with synchronized head acceleration, video recordings, and journal entries, recorded mobile brain-body activity of Spanish heritage students. Each student's brain-body activity was recorded as they experienced spaces in Houston, Texas (“Preparation” stage), and while they worked on their creative texts (“Generation” stage). We used Generalized Partial Directed Coherence (gPDC) to compare the functional connectivity among both stages. There was a trend of higher gPDC in the Preparation stage from right temporo-parietal (TP10) to left anterior-frontal (AF07) brain scalp areas within 1–50 Hz, not reaching statistical significance. The opposite directionality was found for the Generation stage, with statistical significant differences ( p < 0.05) restricted to the delta band (1–4 Hz). There was statistically higher gPDC observed for the inter-hemispheric connections AF07–AF08 in the delta and theta bands (1–8 Hz), and AF08 to TP09 in the alpha and beta (8–30 Hz) bands. The left anterior-frontal (AF07) recordings showed higher power localized to the gamma band (32–50 Hz) for the Generation stage. An ancillary analysis of Sample Entropy did not show significant difference. The information transfer from anterior-frontal to temporal-parietal areas of the scalp may reflect multisensory interpretation during the Preparation stage, while brain signals originating at temporal-parietal toward frontal locations during the Generation stage may reflect the final decision making process to translate the multisensory experience into a creative text. 

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4. Classifying Subjects with PFC Lesions from Healthy Controls during Working Memory Encoding via Graph Convolutional Networks

   https://doi.org/10.1109/NER52421.2023.10123793  

   Balaji, Sai Sanjay; Parhi, Keshab K. (April 2023, 2023 11th International IEEE/EMBS Conference on Neural Engineering (NER))

   This paper describes a group-level classification of 14 patients with prefrontal cortex (pFC) lesions from 20 healthy controls using multi-layer graph convolutional networks (GCN) with features inferred from the scalp EEG recorded from the encoding phase of working memory (WM) trials. We first construct undirected and directed graphs to represent the WM encoding for each trial for each subject using distance correlation- based functional connectivity measures and differential directed information-based effective connectivity measures, respectively. Centrality measures of betweenness centrality, eigenvector centrality, and closeness centrality are inferred for each of the 64 channels from the brain connectivity. Along with the three centrality measures, each graph uses the relative band powers in the five frequency bands - delta, theta, alpha, beta, and gamma- as node features. The summarized graph representation is learned using two layers of GCN followed by mean pooling, and fully connected layers are used for classification. The final class label for a subject is decided using majority voting based on the results from all the subject's trials. The GCN-based model can correctly classify 28 of the 34 subjects (82.35% accuracy) with undirected edges represented by functional connectivity measure of distance correlation and classify all 34 subjects (100% accuracy) with directed edges characterized by effective connectivity measure of differential directed information. 

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5. A new measure for team performance: Measuring inter-brain synchrony of engineering students when designing and building

   Aruon, A.; Shealy, T.; Gero, J. (June 2023, Engineering project organization journal)

   This research paper examines the patterns of inter-brain synchrony among engineering student teams and the relationship between inter-brain synchrony and team cooperation and performance. A pilot study was conducted with eight two-person teams of fourth-year undergraduate civil engineering students. Three collaborative design and build tasks were assigned to each team. Two independent raters carried out the behavioral analysis, scoring team cooperation. Each team member wore a functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) device to measure inter-brain synchrony during the tasks. The results showed that inter-brain synchrony occurred during the team task, but the patterns varied between groups and tasks. Elevated levels of inter-brain synchrony were observed in the left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC) and left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC). The left VLPFC and left DLPFC are often associated with cognitive processes such as problem-solving, working memory, decision-making, and coordinated verbal exchange. Inter-brain synchrony was positively correlated with task performance and cooperation when teams were asked to design and build a structure given limited time and money but negatively correlated with cooperation and performance on other more open-ended design sketching tasks. The study’s findings suggest that inter-brain synchrony exists when engineering students work together as a team, but the results are inconsistent between task types. Inter-brain synchrony could be a useful metric for measuring team cooperation and performance, particularly in tasks that require coordinated verbal exchange, problemsolving, and decision-making. However, the study’s small sample size limits the generalizability of the results. Future studies with a larger sample size and more diverse groups of engineers are needed to validate the findings and explore their implications further. 

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