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

工程设计是保障国家健康、繁荣和福利的重要环节。工程设计的一个重要步骤是产生新的想法。任何丰富这一步骤的东西都可以帮助改善造福社会的结果。然而，在工程设计过程中，新想法的产生往往会在早期达到顶峰，并随着时间的推移而下降。这可能会阻碍创新，因为工程师倾向于专注于旧的想法，而不是产生新的想法。为了帮助工程师保持他们产生新想法的能力，该项目将通过大脑激活的自我调节来测试一种新颖的解决方案。神经认知反馈测量大脑中血液流动的变化，并在电脑屏幕上直观地将这些信息提供给设计师，设计师被要求通过自我调节保持大脑高度活跃。神经认知反馈可以通过使隐藏的大脑状态信息易于获取来提高认知能力。神经认知反馈有可能帮助设计工程师更好地了解自己的表现能力，并帮助他们调整自己的思维方式。培养更多有自我意识的工程师，他们可以快速调整自己的思维方式，从而产生更多创新的解决方案和更熟练的问题解决者。本研究的目的是测试神经认知反馈对工程设计的影响。本研究项目将回答以下问题：(1)神经认知反馈对工程师创意的流畅性和创造性有何影响；(2)神经认知反馈对脑激活的影响；(3)大脑活动如何与产生的想法类型相关联？工程师将被随机选择接受关于他们自己的神经认知反馈，随机反馈，或者没有神经认知反馈。然后，每个工程师将被要求为一个工程问题构思设计解决方案。研究团队将测量他们的大脑在一段时间内的激活模式，工程师们开发的解决方案的数量，他们开发这些解决方案的时间，以及由专家小组评估这些解决方案的创造力。该项目将有助于更好地理解为什么神经认知反馈维持大脑激活，并将为神经认知激活的自我调节如何影响设计提供新的见解。自我调节并不是当前工程设计模型或理论的一部分。这个项目的发现将扩展目前的理解，并提供在工程设计过程中发生的神经认知功能的新特征。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.