Engineering Pareidolia: Mental Imagery, Perceptual Scaffolding, and Visual Creativity

Pareidolia is often 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 engineered pareidolia functions as externally scaffolded mental imagery: minimal visual constraints recruit internally generated templates and top-down inference while remaining anchored to sensory input. To strengthen theoretical rigor, we define necessary and sufficient features that distinguish this construct from adjacent accounts (scaffolded cognition; perceptual scaffolding; bistable perception). Using Arcimboldo’s composite portraits and Dürer’s embedded face in View of the Arco Valley, plus a canonical Renaissance example (Leonardo’s Bacchus/Saint John the Baptist), we outline distinct “design regimes” that modulate cue validity, attentional release, and interpretive switching. We then connect engineered pareidolia to creativity research by linking pareidolia design and detection to measurable constructs in divergent/creative perception, including but not limited to Torrance-style domains, and we propose feasible behavioral and neurophysiological paradigms that control for artistic skill and clinical status. Finally, we distinguish benign pareidolia from hallucination, discuss clinical resonance in dementia with Lewy bodies where pareidolia can be quantified, and outline an empirically testable research program that reframes pareidolia as a bridge between imagination, perception, and creativity.