Lars,
You shouldn't be surprised there is little neuroscience in design research. Even studying basic concept formation using neuroscience is a difficult task. Neuroscience allows you to look at things at a neural level, you have quite a few of abstraction levels up to the macro-level of cognition (motives, activities, reason, consciousness, and socially, culturally, and physically situated cognition). The ecological validity of making generalizations between abstraction levels can be questioned. We don't even know how to explain the correlates of the experienced phenomenon and brain activation, which is a cornerstone of cognitive neuroscience. So we should be careful with bold statements between the levels of abstraction. But I know many reductionist cognitive neuroscientists disagree with me.
There are however mechanisms at the neural level that can be interesting to study in design research, but they will be confined to quite an unnatural lab and experiment situation, and ecological validity will therefore also be questionable in this kind of research. I'm although sure that neuroscientific studies in design will provide valuable insights in the coming years.
John Gero mentioned that they had started to run some experiments using ERP. And I think that Maarit Mäkelä and Camilla Groth at Aalto are working in this direction too. I'm sure that there is more research currently underway.
Best regards
Mattias Arvola, Ph.D., Docent
Associate Professor of Cognitive Science
Director of the Cognitive Science Bachelor’s Programme
Department of Computer and Information Science
Linköping University
Phone +46 13 28 57 03
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