The Impact of Online Communication at Work on Creativit

Post by Megan McCullough

The takeaway

Videoconferencing as a means of communication inhibits the production of creative ideas. This is because the narrow visual field of those using a digital screen correlates with a narrower cognitive focus.

What's the science?

As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a switch to full-time or hybrid remote employment. This shift is projected to outlast the pandemic, with 20% of all U.S workdays estimated to take place remotely even after the pandemic ends. Because of the impact of collaboration on workplace productivity, recent studies have examined the effect of working remotely on the quality and quantity of creative ideas. This week in Nature, Brucks and Levav examined the impact of the physical difference between remote and in-person work on generating and selecting creative ideas.

How did they do it?

The authors conducted two separate studies to examine the productivity differences between online and in-person collaboration. The first study took place in a laboratory setting. The authors randomly paired 602 college undergraduates and randomly assigned them to a virtual or an in-person condition. All pairs were tasked with generating alternative uses for a product and then selecting their most creative task. The authors recorded the number of ideas each pair generated and assigned creativity scores to each idea to measure the decision-making skills of each pair. To test the hypothesis that any differences in creativity between the two groups is due to the effect of screens on narrowing the visual scope of the user, the authors measured the ability of participants to recall props placed around the room and recorded eye gaze during the task. 

The second study involved 1,490 engineers in a realistic work setting. It was conducted to extend the findings of the laboratory study to a more realistic environment. These participants were randomly paired and assigned to one of the two groups. Then they were asked to generate product ideas and select one to submit to their company. As in the first experiment, the authors recorded the number of ideas each pair generated and assigned creativity scores to each idea.

What did they find?

In both the laboratory and field experiments, the authors found that pairs in the virtual groups generated fewer total ideas and fewer creative ideas. There was no statistically significant impact of condition on the ability to select an idea. One hypothesis as to why the difference occurs is that narrowing one’s visual focus to a screen also narrows cognitive focus. The data supported this hypothesis: virtual pairs spent more time looking at their partners and less time looking around the room. The ability to recall the props placed around the room and increased gaze around the room were correlated with an increase in creative ideas.

What's the impact?

This study found that there are differences in the generation of creative ideas between colleagues who collaborate in person compared to those who collaborate through videoconferencing. Videoconferencing groups were less effective at generating creative ideas than their in-person counterparts. This research suggests that there is an advantage to in-person work when it comes to creativity and idea generation. As companies move forward in developing remote work policies after the pandemic, this area of research will become important in the formation of those policies. 

Mental Disengagement From Navigation Degrades Spatial Codes for the Environment

Post by Lani Cupo

The takeaway

When animals navigate an environment, the hippocampus forms a spatial code based on sensory cues and motion. Mentally disengaging from navigation leads to the degradation of place codes, even when physical motion through the environment is still occurring, suggesting that internal state, not just external information, is critical to forming a spatial code.

What's the science?

Previous research in rodent navigation has established the existence of “place cells” — neurons in the hippocampus that respond to specific positions or directions in the external environment that allow animals to navigate. Specific patterns of activity among these neurons can be viewed as a spatial code, however, it is yet unknown how mental engagement impacts the activation of these spatial codes. This week in Nature Neuroscience, Pettit, Yuan, and colleagues investigated the role of mental engagement in activating spatial codes in mice by examining their behavior and neuronal activity during reward-based navigation tasks in a virtual environment. 

How did they do it?

The authors constructed a virtual environment for male adult mice, with each mouse placed on top of a spherical treadmill. The heads of the mice were restrained to allow for concurrent cellular imaging, however the mice could freely rotate the treadmill. Motion was captured with optical sensors and the information was relayed to a projection on a screen in front of the mouse’s head displaying an environment with visual cues that the mice were trained to recognize. Mice could achieve water rewards in certain “reward zones” of the virtual environment by licking a spout in front of them. Cell imaging was achieved with a method known as two-photon microscopy: lasers are shined on cells, and, because the mouse strains express fluorescent calcium indicators in neurons, light is emitted back upon neuronal activation and can be recorded during waking behavior. This allows the researchers to examine when neurons fire, linking neuronal activation with mouse behavior. In this study, the authors quantified the degree to which mice were engaged or disengaged via lick-based metrics, based on how spatially selective and abundant mouse licks were.

What did they find?

While some sessions included almost only engaged trials, other sessions included larger proportions of disengaged trials, and these usually occurred together at the end of sessions, indicating that mice switched from engaged to disengaged behavior. This could indicate satiety as they received about 1 mL of water. During engaged sessions, neural activity formed specific sequences or place codes. However, the activity of the population of cells differed during disengaged trials. Regardless of whether the trial was engaged or disengaged, the mouse was moving through the environment, indicating that the change in neural activity was not due to placement in the environment, but was instead associated with the mouse’s altered behavior reflecting mental disengagement, even when matching trials on variables such as running speed. Furthermore, when considering the activity of all neurons at a population level, there was no difference between engaged and disengaged trials, suggesting a degradation of the spatial code, not just a general alteration in neural activity. Finally, by examining neuronal activity in streaks of engaged and disengaged trials, the authors found that the shift in activity happened in less than a minute.

What's the impact?

This study found that the hippocampal place codes that are associated with rodent navigation of the environment degrade when mice mentally disengage from a goal-directed task. The authors’ findings suggest that beyond sensory cues and motion information, mental engagement is required to establish hippocampal spatial maps of the surrounding environment. These findings challenge the established idea that spatial maps form automatically in rodent hippocampi and demonstrate that internal state impacts neural encoding of the external environment.

The Anterior Cingulate Cortex Signals the Need to Control Intrusive Thoughts

Post by Leanna Kalinowski

The takeaway

The human brain has evolved mechanisms that enable it to suppress unwanted memories from coming to mind. This study identified a crucial role for the anterior cingulate cortex in detecting and responding to these intrusive thoughts.

What's the science?

Recalling an unwanted memory can be distressing, but luckily, the human brain has adapted to be able to prevent such memories from coming to mind. When such memories intrude, the brain detects a need for control, which engages the prefrontal cortex to inhibit activity in the hippocampus, which then stops retrieval of the unwanted memory. However, it is unknown which brain region is responsible for detecting and coordinating a response to this need for control. During non-memory contexts (e.g., moments of surprise), many scientists believe that the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) coordinates a need for control, but this region’s role in inhibiting unwanted memories has not yet been examined. This week in the Journal of Neuroscience, Crespo García and colleagues tested the role of the ACC in processing and preventing unwanted memories.

How did they do it?

Twenty-four participants first underwent the “study phase”. Here, they were tasked with studying 64 pairs of words that were shown side-by-side on a computer screen for 5 seconds each. After being shown each word pair, they were given one word from each pair and were asked to recall its associated word. Each participant repeated the study phase until they were able to correctly recall at least 50% of the words, and the words that they recalled were then used in the subsequent phase.

Participants next underwent the “Think, No-Think (TNT) phase”. This phase consisted of six blocks, each containing 80 words. During “Think” trials, a word appeared with a green frame around it, and participants were asked to recall and think about its associated word. During “No-Think” trials, a word appeared with a red frame around it, and participants were asked to pay full attention to the word on the screen but to actively prevent the associated word from entering their memory. During this phase, participants underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans and electroencephalography (EEG) recordings to measure brain activity.

Finally, they performed two types of tests: a same probe test, in which they were shown a word and were asked to say out loud its associated word, and an independent probe test, where they were given a category and were asked to say out loud any word from the original list that was within this category (e.g., category = “vehicle”).

What did they find?

From the EEG recordings, the researchers found that theta signals in the ACC play a role in detecting a need for memory control, particularly during two key time points. The first time point was early in the “No-Think” trials, which suggests a proactive control prior to the unwanted memory. This signal was associated with reduced activity (via fMRI) in the hippocampus, ACC, and prefrontal cortex, suggesting that the suppression of memory early on led to a decrease in demand for activity from these brain regions. The second time point was later into the “No-Think” trial, which suggests a reactive response following the successful intrusion of the unwanted memories. This was associated with increased communication from the ACC, to the prefrontal cortex, to the hippocampus, suggesting that these brain regions work together to facilitate forgetting of the unwanted memory.

What's the impact?

This study showed that the ACC not only detects the need for memory control but also responds proactively and reactively to unwanted memories by triggering other brain regions that are necessary for memory processing. During instances where unwanted memories still emerge, the ACC communicates with the prefrontal cortex, and these regions then work together to inhibit the hippocampus and suppress the intrusive thought.