Virtual Reality and EEG in Creativity Research: Investigating the Impact of Designed Environments on Creative Performance

Creativity is a distinctive feature of human nature that involves various cognitive processes and drives innovation, progress, and personal growth. Recent research in cognitive neuroscience challenges the traditional belief that creativity is a fixed trait. Through investigations of the temporal neural correlations of a person’s creative action, neuroscientists have revealed that creativity is dynamic and based on both explicit and implicit processing to generate and evaluate ideas. In other words, there are distinct steps that lead to a creative action or proposal, such as the analysis of a task, the generation of ideas and their verification, which require different modes of thinking. These different modes of thinking, which correspond to different patterns of brain waves, can be further categorised into divergent, convergent, abstract, and concrete thinking. This paper presents an overview of an ongoing research project that aims to investigate the effect of designed environments on the different stages of a human’s creativity. Tracking the creative performance of individuals in the VR space by using both electroencephalography (EEG) and questionnaires allowed us to gain insights about the ability of spaces with high aesthetic quality to foster creativity. The experimental set-up permitted us also to draw conclusions about the suitability of neuroscience tools in architectural design contexts. This paper provides an overview of the theoretical basis, and a critical review of the employed tools and methods, with a focus on the use of VR technology and EEG in evaluating creativity. Furthermore, the paper outlines potential applications of VR, specifically through VR drawing, in empirical studies of creativity.