Cognitive and neural mechanisms of mental imagery supporting creative cognition.

Abstract

While the role of mental imagery in creative cognition is acknowledged, the specific cognitive and neural mechanisms remain underexplored. This study aims to elucidate the supportive role of mental imagery in creative cognition from a semantic memory perspective, and elucidating its underlying neural substrates. Initially, we conducted a behavioral study and found positive correlation between the vividness of touch imagery with creative performance in a creative writing task. By establishing semantic feature indicators based on writing texts and mediation models, we found that the vividness of touch imagery facilitates creative writing performance by semantic integration and reorganization. A subsequent behavioral study comparing mental imagery and semantic understanding strategies usage in creative writing tasks further confirmed the positive impact of mental imagery on creative cognition, and suggested that semantic reorganization, beyond the role of semantic integration, plays a critical role in how mental imagery enhances creativity. Finally, a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study explored the distribution of functional brain networks' edge communities during creative writing under mental imagery and semantic understanding conditions. We found that the sensorimotor network facilitates sensorimotor simulations in creative cognition; the dorsal attention and salience networks collaboratively support the writing process by maintaining goal-directed attention and reorienting attention; the limbic network supports multimodal semantic processing and novel associations; the frontoparietal control network and default mode network contribute to information integration; and a subnetwork of default mode network plays a special role in integrating semantic information related to objects and actions. Collectively, our study sheds light on the cognitive and neural underpinnings of mental imagery supporting creative cognition.