Collaborative Research: Neuro-Cognitive Feedback to Enhance Engineering Design of Systems

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Engineering design is a critical process to ensure national health, prosperity, and welfare. An important step during engineering design is the generation of new ideas. Anything that enriches this step can help improve outcomes that benefit society. However, the generation of new ideas tends to peak early and decline over time during the engineering design process. This can prevent innovation because engineers tend to fixate on older ideas instead of generating new ones. To help engineers sustain their ability to generate new ideas, this project will test a novel solution through the self-regulation of brain activation. Neuro-cognitive feedback measures change in blood flow in the brain and visually provides this information on a computer screen to designers, who are asked to keep their brain activation high through self-regulation. Neuro-cognitive feedback can improve cognitive performance by making information about hidden brain states accessible. Neuro-cognitive feedback has the potential to help design engineers better understand their own performance abilities and help them adjust their mental approach. Developing more self-aware engineers that can quickly adjust their mental approach can lead to more innovative solutions and more skilled problem-solvers.The goal of this research is to test the effects of neuro-cognitive feedback on engineering design. The questions that this research project will answer are: (1) what is the effect of neuro-cognitive feedback on the fluency and creativity of ideas generated by engineers; (2) what is the effect of neuro-cognitive feedback on brain activation; and (3) how does brain activation correlate with the types of ideas that are generated? Engineers will be randomly selected to receive neuro-cognitive feedback about themselves, random feedback, or no neuro-cognitive feedback. Each engineer will then be asked to ideate design solutions to an engineering problem. The research team will measure patterns of activation in their brain over time, the number of solutions the engineers develop, when they develop these solutions, and the creativity of these solutions assessed by a panel of experts. This project will lead to a better understanding about why neuro-cognitive feedback sustains brain activation and will offer new insight about how self-regulation of neuro-cognitive activation affects design. Self-regulation is not a part of current models or theories in engineering design. The findings from this project will extend current understanding and offer new characterizations of the neuro-cognitive functions that occur during the engineering design process.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.