When Less is More: The Effects of Attentional Control on Creative Design

In creativity research, there is a long history of studying the processes that support imagination in design. I will review some of this literature, and present a recent study conducted to advance research on this topic. Specifically, there is evidence to suggest that during creative cognition, people tend to blink, close their eyes, or look away—activities hypothesized to reduce the analysis of the external visual environment to promote internally-oriented cognition. To test this hypothesis, we collected eye-movement data while Canadian Armed Forces members imagined and drew new weapons within twenty minutes. Separately, we collected resting-state fMRI data to examine functional connectivity among theoretically-relevant networks. The oculomotor data demonstrated that time spent gazing away rather than executing drawings predicted the novelty of the weapons. In addition, the fMRI data demonstrated that reduced functional connectivity between the frontoparietal and dorsal attention networks, along with the frontoparietal and motor networks, predicted the novelty and fluency of drawings, respectively. These results suggest that averting gaze and reductions of cognitive and motoric control may facilitate creativity in design, shedding light on processes that facilitate ideation and production.

Speaker Bio:

Oshin Vartanian is a Defence Scientist at Defence Research and Development Canada, Toronto Research Centre, and a cross-appointed Graduate Faculty member in the Department of Psychology at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on the effects of operational and environmental stressors on the health and performance of military personnel. Furthermore, he studies the cognitive and neural bases of aesthetics and creativity.

Online: https://utoronto.zoom.us/j/82187688548