Cognitive and neural mechanisms of mental imagery supporting creative cognition – Communications Biology

New behavioral and neuroimaging evidence shows how mental imagery boosts creative writing by reshaping semantic memory and dynamically reconfiguring brain networks.

Mental imagery doesn’t just color our inner world; it can also sharpen our creative output. A new study unpacks the cognitive and neural machinery behind this effect, revealing that vivid, multisensory imagery supports creative cognition by helping people integrate and reorganize concepts in semantic memory—and by engaging overlapping, dynamic brain networks during creative writing.

Key takeaway: Imagery fuels better ideas through semantic rewiring

In an initial behavioral study, the authors found that people who reported more vivid tactile imagery performed better on a creative writing task. By mining the texts for semantic features and applying mediation models, they showed that imagery’s benefits flowed through two mechanisms: semantic integration—linking distant ideas into coherent narratives—and semantic reorganization—flexibly restructuring conceptual relationships to fit the story’s needs.

A follow-up experiment compared two writing strategies: an “imagery” approach (constructing multisensory scenes from the prompt) and a “semantic understanding” approach (focusing on meaning without sensory simulation). The imagery strategy again improved creative performance. Crucially, the data suggested that semantic reorganization, beyond simple integration, plays a decisive role in how imagery elevates creativity.

Why imagery matters for creativity

Imagery is an active, working-memory process that retrieves sensory attributes from long-term memory to construct quasi-perceptual representations—whether grounded in real experiences or entirely imagined. This capability is deeply intertwined with creativity, which depends on generating, evaluating, and refining ideas.

The study frames this link through semantic memory—the vast storehouse of concepts and facts that can be recombined in novel ways. Mental imagery contributes modality-specific inputs that feed into semantic representations and are modulated by top-down control. The findings align with hub-and-spoke models (with the anterior temporal lobes acting as a multimodal hub), as well as controlled semantic cognition accounts where attention and goal signals tune the activation of relevant features.

Importantly, the work treats semantic features in writing as dynamic state variables, not fixed traits. That choice reflects how creativity emerges in real time, as writers broaden their search through memory and flexibly restructure associations.

How the team tested it

• Behavioral correlations: Participants reported imagery vividness (Plymouth Sensory Imagery Questionnaire). Higher tactile imagery predicted stronger creative writing scores.
• Mechanistic indicators: The researchers extracted two semantic indicators from participants’ texts—semantic integration (binding distant concepts into cohesive narratives) and semantic network robustness (a proxy for flexible reorganization and cognitive flexibility).
• Strategy manipulation: In a separate cohort, participants wrote using either an imagery-based strategy or a meaning-focused strategy inspired by dual coding theory. The imagery condition yielded superior creative outcomes, with evidence pointing to semantic reorganization as a key driver.

Inside the creative brain: overlapping, dynamic networks

To probe the neural basis of imagery-driven creativity, the team conducted an fMRI study of participants writing under imagery and semantic-understanding conditions. Rather than relying solely on traditional node-centric connectivity, they used an edge-centric framework that captures the synchrony of time-varying interactions between connections themselves (edge functional connectivity, or eFC). This method exposes overlapping communities—meaning a single brain region can participate in multiple functional coalitions—reflecting the flexible, multiplex nature of creative cognition.

The results point to a coalition of large-scale networks, each with a distinct role:

• Sensorimotor network: Supports embodied simulations that enrich narrative detail and action dynamics.
• Dorsal attention and salience networks: Maintain goal-directed focus and rapidly reorient attention to salient ideas during writing.
• Limbic network: Engages in multimodal semantic processing and forging novel associations.
• Frontoparietal control network (FPCN) and default mode network (DMN): Collaborate to integrate information across modalities and knowledge stores.
• DMN subnetwork: Shows a special role in integrating object- and action-related semantics—critical for vivid scene construction.

By mapping edge communities back to nodes, the team observed overlapping participation patterns consistent with a heterarchical, not strictly modular, control architecture. This dovetails with prior creativity research showing dynamic coupling between FPCN and DMN, and supports the idea that creative thinking recruits multiple brain systems in shifting configurations over time.

Embodiment, domain specificity, and semantic search

The findings reinforce the embodied nature of creativity: physical action systems and sensory simulations scaffold imaginative thought, enabling richer narrative construction. They also echo domain-specific nuances—different creative domains may lean on distinct imagery skills (e.g., object vs. spatial visualization), underscoring the importance of studying imagery within specific creative behaviors like writing.

From a semantic network perspective, high creativity often reflects a “flatter” associative landscape with shorter paths between concepts and more flexible exploration. This study links that flexibility to imagery-enabled integration and reorganization, bridging cognitive theory with measurable text features and neural dynamics.

What this means—and what’s next

Put simply: mental imagery doesn’t just make writing more vivid; it helps writers connect far-flung ideas and reshape conceptual relations on the fly. On the brain side, imagery-anchored creativity depends on overlapping, dynamically reconfiguring networks that blend sensorimotor simulation, attention control, semantic association, and integrative processing.

Practically, this suggests that training multisensory imagery—especially tactile and action-oriented imagery—could enhance creative writing by bolstering semantic integration and flexibility. Methodologically, edge-centric analyses offer a powerful lens for decoding the multiplex architecture of creative cognition, moving beyond one-network-at-a-time models.

Together, the behavioral and neuroimaging data deliver a cohesive account: mental imagery enhances creativity by deepening access to semantic memory and enabling its agile reorganization, while the brain orchestrates this process through overlapping, adaptable networks tuned to the demands of crafting new ideas.