Educational background’s impact on designers’ ideation: brain, behavior, and stress

Design Neurocognition, a field bridging Design Research and Cognitive Neuroscience, offers new insights into the cognitive processes underlying creative ideation. This study adopts a micro-perspective on design ideation by examining convergent and divergent thinking as its core components. Using 32-channel EEG recordings, it investigates how educational background (Industrial Design Engineering vs. Engineering Design) influences designers'neural activity (alpha, beta, and gamma frequency bands), behavioral responses, and perceived stress during ideation tasks. Data from forty participants reveal a consistent and meaningful interaction between brain activity, behavior, and self-reported stress, highlighting that educational background significantly modulates cognitive and neural patterns during ideation. Importantly, perceived stress shows strong negative correlations with neural power across all frequency bands, suggesting a close alignment between subjective experience and physiological measures. By integrating neural, behavioral, and psychological data, this study advances the understanding of the neurocognitive mechanisms driving design ideation and establishes a methodological foundation for bridging Design and Cognitive Neuroscience. These findings contribute to building a unified evidence base for future human-centred and neuro-informed design research.