Attention Required! | Cloudflare

In a virtual meeting, all eyes are focused on screens and ignore the environment, which "constrains the associative process underlying idea generation,".

An often overlooked ingredient in the secret sauce of collaboration is that, in person, team members typically share visual cues from their environment — and each other — that can spur ideas.

The study only looks at the cognitive costs of collaborating virtually, and the authors note that there are "concrete and immediate economic advantages to virtual interaction," including reduced travel time and expenses, less overhead, and other factors, to be balanced.

In-person meetings generate more ideas — and more creative ones — compared to videoconferencing.