EVALUATING THE USE OF fNIRS TO STUDY DESIGN FIXATION

Abstract

Design fixation is a cognitive phenomenon that limits creativity by causing designers to become attached to an initial idea or example. This can inhibit the diversity of conceptual design. While prior research has explored the behavioral effects of fixation, its underlying neural processes have remained less studied. This present study explores the use of functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to detect the neural activity associated with design fixation during early-stage design. A total of 11 participants from East Carolina University, with a range of academic backgrounds, were recruited for this study; one dataset was excluded due to early termination, leaving 10 participants included in the final analysis. Participants completed a series of design tasks under fixation and non-fixation conditions, while the prefrontal cortex activity was recorded using fNIRS. Oxygenated (HbO) and deoxygenated hemoglobin (HbR) signals were used to analyze the left and right prefrontal cortex using a region-of-interest analysis. A statistically significant increase in HbO activity was observed in the right prefrontal cortex during induced fixation. However, this effect did not remain significant after false discovery rate correction. No other significant differences were observed during non-fixation conditions. There were also no other significant observations in the left prefrontal cortex. These findings suggest that fNIRS has the potential to be used reliably for studying design fixation, but further research with larger sample sizes and refined experimental procedures is needed to confirm its reliability.