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Assessing creativity is not an easy task, but that has not stopped researchers from exploring it. Because creativity is essential to engineering disciplines, knowing how to enhance creative abilities through engineering education has been a topic of interest. In this paper, the event related potential (ERP) technique is used to study the neural responses of engineers via a modified alternative uses task (AUT). Though only a pilot study testing two participants, the preliminary results of this study indicate general neuro-responsiveness to novel or unusual stimuli. These findings also suggest that a scaled-up study along these lines would enable better understanding and modeling of neuroresponses of engineers and creative thinking, as well as contribute to the growing field of ERP research in the field of engineering. 

Investigations of creativity have been an intriguing topic for a long time, but assessing creativity is extremely complex. Creativity is a cornerstone of engineering disciplines, so understanding creativity and how to enhance creative abilities through engineering education has received substantial attention. Fields outside of engineering are no stranger to neuro-investigations of creativity and although some neuro-response studies have been conducted to understand creativity in engineering, these studies need to map the engineering design and concept generation processes better. Using neuroimaging techniques alongside engineering design and concept generation processes is necessary for understanding how to improve creative idea generation and creativity studies in engineering. In this paper, a survey is provided of the literature for the different neurological approaches that have been used to study the engineering design process and creative processes. Also presented are proposed strategies to apply these neurological approaches to engineering design to understand the creative process in greater detail. Furthermore, results from a pilot study investigating neuro-responses of engineers are presented. 

Creativity is the driver of innovation in engineering. Hence, assessing the effectiveness of a curriculum, a method, or a technique in enhancing the creativity of engineering students is no doubt important. In this paper, the process involved in quantifying creativity when measured through the alternative uses task (AUT) is explained in detail. The AUT is a commonly used test for divergent thinking ability, which is a main aspect of creativity. Although it is commonly used, the processes used to score this task are far from standardized and tend to differ across studies. In this paper, we introduce these problems and move towards a standardized process by providing a detailed account of our quantification process. This quantification process takes into consideration four commonly used dimensions of creativity: originality, flexibility, fluency, and elaboration. AUT data from a preliminary case study were used to illustrate how the AUT and the quantification process can be used. The study was performed to understand the effect of the stereotype threat on the creativity of 25 female engineering students. The results indicate that after the stereotype threat intervention, participants generated more diverse and original ideas. 

Engineering programs, in general, do not explicitly address the need to enhance divergent thinking. To a certain extent this is due to a lack in knowledge on the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying divergent thinking, and creative ideation more generally. We hypothesize that we can help enhance our students’ divergent thinking and creative processing outcomes by investigating the impacts of carefully selected methods and tools enabled by developments in the robust analysis of engineering ideation performance, and neurocognitive responses to creativity. In this paper, we present an experiment using the Event-Related brain Potentials (ERP) technique and creative language use (funded by Core R&D Programs). More specifically, we collected ERP responses to literal, nonsense, and novel metaphorical sentences that were either referring to engineering knowledge or general knowledge, testing engineering and non-engineering students. Following Rutter et al. [1], sentences differed in verb only and had been classified in prior sentence norming studies as highly unusual and highly appropriate (novel metaphors), low unusual and highly appropriate (literal sentences), and highly unusual and low appropriate (nonsense sentences). Participants read sentences while their EEG was recorded, and after reading the sentence made judgments about its unusualness and appropriateness. The findings indicate that prior knowledge modulates novel metaphor processing at the stage of lexico–semantic access, indexed by the amplitude of N400 component. Specifically, N400 amplitudes to novel metaphorical sentences are significantly reduced and pattern with literal sentences in engineers; in nonengineers, by contrast, we observed increased N400 amplitudes to novel metaphorical sentences that pattern with anomalous sentences. This mirror effect on the N400 corroborates recent findings demonstrating a strong impact of prior experience and expertise on meaning ambiguity resolution, which may in turn have implications for creative cognition.