Engineering Pareidolia: Mental Imagery and Visual Creativity

Pareidolia is usually framed as a viewer-side illusion, a tendency to perceive meaningful forms, especially faces, in ambiguous inputs. This Concept Paper argues that pareidolia can also be deliberately engineered and therefore provides a tractable entry point into the neurophysiology of visual creativity. We propose a unifying construct in which pareidolia functions as externally scaffolded mental imagery. Minimal visual constraints trigger a completion process that shares functional features with imagery, including reliance on internally generated templates and top-down inference, while remaining anchored to sensory input. This perspective connects mental imagery, visual perception, artistic cognition, and creativity within a single mechanistic narrative. Using Arcimboldo’s composite portraits and Dürer’s embedded face in View of the Arco Valley as complementary case studies, we outline how artists may transform an internally simulated pareidolic template into a stable perceptual outcome in the viewer, anticipating attention, viewing conditions, and individual differences. We then propose an operational bridge to creativity research by linking pareidolia design to constructs classically measured by the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking, and we formulate testable predictions for behavioral and neuroimaging paradigms. Finally, we discuss cultural motivations for pareidolic techniques, including virtuoso “challenges” between artists and the possibility of layered or contestatory messages embedded through cryptic symbolism, and we highlight clinical resonance in neurodegenerative disorders where pareidolia can be quantified and is clinically meaningful.