E-Paper
Videoconferencing hinders creativity, study finds
The study, published in Nature, paired 1,500 people and asked them to come up with new product ideas and choose one to submit as a future product innovation over a video chat or in person.
Video conversations lower the generation of creative ideas when compared to in-person meetings, a study said Wednesday, suggesting that workplaces should prioritize brainstorming sessions for the office.
Pandemic has altered the nature of office work, resulting in a tremendous increase in videoconferencing that shows no signs of abating as global homeworking grows more established.
The study, published in Nature, paired 1,500 people and asked them to come up with new product ideas and choose one to submit as a future product innovation over a video chat or in person.
Melanie Brucks and Jonathan Levay, the study's authors, discovered that in comparison to those who met digitally, face-to-face partners generated more ideas, particularly creative ideas.
However, the results showed that both groups were equally effective when it came to deciding which concept to put forward. The authors discovered that virtual partners spend more time staring straight at each other than glancing about the room using eye-tracking data, according to the study.
The data imply that when people use a computer, their visual attention narrows, which in turn reduces their cognitive focus, according to scientists.
"Specifically, using eye-gaze and recall measures, as well as latent semantic analysis, we demonstrate that videoconferencing hampers idea generation because it focuses communicators on a screen, which prompts a narrower cognitive focus."
The authors concluded, based on the results, that "virtual interaction comes with a cognitive cost for creative idea generation".
"Our results indicate that, in these hybrid setups, it might make sense to prioritise creative idea generation during in-person meetings," the study said.
