Cognitive styles diversity and group creativity: Evidence from fNIRS hyperscanning
Description
Cognitive styles diversity refers to the differences between team members in processing and sharing information. The purpose of this study is to reveal the interpersonal neural mechanism of the influence of cognitive style diversity on group creativity. 116 college students were assigned to high cognitive style diversity (HD; the members respectively are field-independent or field-dependent cognitive styles) groups or low cognitive style diversity (LD; the members both are either field-independent cognitive styles or field-dependent cognitive styles) groups according to their cognitive style types. Both groups were asked to complete the creative task (umbrella design task) and the general task (desk purchase task). At the same time, we used functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to record the brain activity levels of PFC and r-TPJ regions of two subjects in each group. The results show that the novelty of group creative results in HD group is significantly higher than that in LD group. FNIRS results showed that the brain synchronization increment in the frontal pole and dorsolateral prefrontal lobe (DLPFC) in the HD was significantly higher than that in the LD group. In addition, in the HD group, the field-independent cognitive style is in the leading mode in interpersonal neural interaction, and the increase of delayed IBS is positively correlated with the novelty of creative results. These results show that the diversity of cognitive styles may be the result of mutual understanding and cooperation between field independents and field dependents, thus promoting the creativity of groups.