Correlating design performance to EEG activation: early evidence from experimental data

This paper presents an EEG (Electroencephalography) study that explores correlations between the neurophysiological activations, the nature of the design task and its outputs. We propose an experimental protocol that covers several design-related tasks: including fundamental activities (e.g. idea generation and problem-solving) as well as a more comprehensive task requiring the complex higher-level reasoning of designing. We clustered the collected data according to the characteristics of the design outcome and measured EEG alpha band activation during elementary and higher-level design task, whereas just the former yielded statistically significant different behaviour in the left frontal and occipital area. We also found a significant correlation between the ratings for elementary sketching task outcomes and EEG activation at the higher-level design task. These results suggested that EEG activation enables distinguishing groups according to their performance only for elementary tasks. However, this also suggests a potential application of EEG data on the elementary tasks to distinguish the designers’ brain response during the higher level of the design task.