1 Department of Psychology, Université de Montréal, Montréal, H2V 2S9 Québec, Canada.
2 Department of Music, Concordia University, Montréal, H4B1R6 Québec, Canada.
3 Department of Psychology, American University of Beirut, Beirut 1107-2020, Lebanon.
4 MILA (Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute), Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
5 UNIQUE Center (Quebec Neuro-AI Research Center), Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

Creativity is a highly valued and beneficial skill that empirical research typically probes using "divergent thinking" (DT) tasks such as problem solving and novel idea generation. Here, in contrast, we examine the perceptual aspect of creativity by asking whether creative individuals are more likely to perceive recognizable forms in ambiguous stimuli -a phenomenon known as pareidolia. To this end, we designed a visual task in which participants were asked to identify as many recognizable forms as possible in cloud-like fractal images. We found that pareidolic perceptions arise more often and more rapidly in highly creative individuals. Furthermore, high-creatives report pareidolia across a broader range of image contrasts and fractal dimensions than do low creatives. These results extend the established body of work on DT by introducing divergent perception as a complementary manifestation of the creative mind, thus clarifying the perception-creation link while opening new paths for studying creative behavior in humans.