Time of Day and Background: How They Affect Designers' Neurophysiological and Behavioural Performance in Divergent Thinking

This study is part of a broader research conducted by the Polytechnic of Turin in collaboration with the Department of Psychology of the University of Turin. It focuses on Engineering Design, aiming at understanding not only the influence of external and human factors but also the relationship between the behavioural and the neurophysiological response. Engineering Design can be considered as a technical activity whose goal is to come up with a solution that will turn out to be effective in practice. Given its human and social nature, the attention to Design and Creativity, which is one of the most important features of the whole process, has been progressively grown among researchers. It is, indeed, this perspective on Engineering Design that drove scholars to observe and study the cognitive processes behind it and that justifies the analyses carried out in the present work. The neurophysiological data were taken from a pre-existing experiment (Colombo, et al., 2020) while behavioural data relating to participants performances in terms of novelty and quality were gathered starting from the evaluation of the subjects verbal answers, performed by 4 raters that followed specific assessment rules, according to Literature. Focusing on the behavioural response, some ANOVAs have been carried out to investigate its relationships with daytime, participants educational background and neurophysiological signals. It was also deepened through further statistical studies how daytime and background can influence subjects response time and how together with two other factors, the participants stress level and the strategy adopted during the experiment, can affect the neurophysiological response. Significant results were obtained, for example, considering the time of the day in correlation with participants performances in terms of quality and novelty and regarding stress, daytime and background in relation to neurophysiological signals. Moreover, it was observed that different kinds of performances reflect distinct patterns in brain activity.