The Influence Of Cooperation On Group Creativity During Brainstorming And Its Inter-brain Mechanism

Group creativity not equals to the sum of individual creativity,while it is influenced by individual and environmental factors.During the process of completing one creative task,the interaction process such as cooperation has important influences on group creativity.This study aims to investigate the role of spontaneous cooperation and induced cooperation on inter-brain synchronization among group members,and how the inter-brain synchronization's change influence group creativity.The aim of study 1 is to investigate the influence of spontaneous cooperation on group creativity,specifically,which type of group(e.g.,consisting of less-creative or highly-creative individuals)is more likely to occur and its effect on group creativity,additionally,what is the inter-brain synchronization's difference and whether it reflects the cooperation difference among these groups.A preliminary test(an alternative-uses task)was performed to rank individuals' level of creativity,and divide participants into three types of dyads: high-high(two highly-creative individuals),low-low(two lesscreative individuals),and high-low(one highly-creative and one less-creative individual).Dyads were then asked to solve a realistic presented problem(RPP;a typical creativity problem)during which a functional near-infrared spectroscopy(fNIRS)-based hyper scanning device was used to record the variation of interpersonal brain synchronization(IBS).The behavior results revealed that less-creative individuals,while working together,would perform as well as highly-creative individuals.The low-low dyads showed higher levels of cooperation behavior than the other two types of dyads.The fNIRS results revealed increased IBS only for low-low dyads at rDLPFC(right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex)and rTPJ(right temporal-parietal junction)brain regions during RPP task performance.In PFC,the increased IBS was stronger than that of high-high and high-low dyads.In rTPJ,the IBS in the low-low dyads was only stronger than that of the high-low dyads.Besides,the IBS at r DLPFC and rTPJ regions in the low-low dyads was positively correlated with their cooperation behavior and group creative performance.These findings indicated when two lesscreative individuals worked on a creativity problem together,they tended to cooperate with each other(indicated by both behavior index and increased IBS at rDLPFC and r TPJ),which benefited their creative performance.Study 2 aims to investigate the influence of induced cooperation on group creativity,specifically,whether the influence of cooperation still exists on all participants if the interaction type(cooperation VS.competition)was manipulated,besides,does the inter-brain synchronization show patterns between cooperation and competition and whether the difference reflects different levels of cooperation.All participants were assigned to two conditions randomly,part of them were asked to work on the alternative uses task(AUT,experimental condition)and the rest were asked to work on the objective characteristics task(OCT,control condition).And all participants need to complete one of the two tasks twice in cooperation and competition.The behavior results revealed that cooperation have more positive influences than competition both in AUT and OCT,as well as the higher cooperation behavior level.The fnirs results showed that in AUT and OCT,group in cooperation has significant stronger inter brain synchronization(IBS)than in competition both at r DLPFC(right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex)and rTPJ(right temporal-parietal junction)brain regions;what's more,the IBS in AUT was stronger than the IBS in OCT significantly.At last,the IBS at rDLPFC regions in AUT was positively correlated with group creative performance(fluency scores)and the IBS at rTPJ regions in AUT was positively correlated with group creative performance(originality scores);also,the IBS in two regions were both positively correlated with their cooperation behavior.These findings indicated that compared with competition,cooperation contributes to the enhancement of group creativity,and the effect is much more obvious in creative problems.Based on such findings,this study gives positive comments to the role of cooperation in group creativity.From team position to interaction process,cooperation was confirmed to be effective in promoting creativity.Moreover,hyper scanning technique--fnirs was adopted to provide further explanation on how to improve group creativity.