Creative Virtual Environments: Effect of Supraliminal Priming on Team Brainstorming

Much of human behavior involves non-conscious cognition. Research has shown that it is possible to manipulate non-conscious cognition and behavior through "priming", a well-known phenomenon from cognitive psychology. 3-D Virtual Environments (VEs) have shown potential as platforms for virtual collaboration. Visually oriented, VEs represent team members as avatars. We posit that incorporating visual elements designed to improve creativity through priming in VEs can influence team-brainstorming performance. Using Open Wonderland, we developed two environments for virtual team brainstorming: one that looked like a traditional open office environment and one designed to prime team members for improved creativity. Participants worked in teams to generate ideas on a topic. Results show that when teams generated ideas in creativity primed environment, they generated significantly more ideas that were of better quality than when they worked in a neutral priming environment.