Cardiac Timing Biases Creative Exploration and Exploitation

Creative ideation involves a dynamic exchange between exploring new idea categories and exploiting familiar ones, reflecting optimal foraging principles. Although interoceptive signals, particularly cardiac activity, are associated with differences in attention and cognitive control, their role in explore-exploit dynamics during creative idea generation remains unknown. Recording both electroencephalography (EEG) and electrocardiography (ECG) data, we used convolution general linear models to examine cardiac-brain interactions underlying semantic exploration and exploitation during creative idea generation, in both spontaneous (self-selected) and directed (externally cued) conditions. Cardiac deceleration predicted ideation time: this relationship scaled nonlinearly during exploration (category switching), but linearly during exploitation (category persistence), in both conditions. Cardiac deceleration did not predict semantic distance (between response and cue word) or response accuracy during the directed condition, suggesting that heart rate slowing reflects cognitive effort allocation rather than ideational content. Cardiac phase systematically biased explore-exploit dynamics: spontaneous switching and accurate directed-switching were preferentially associated with diastolic phases and parieto-occipital alpha (8-12 Hz) desynchronization, whereas category persistence was associated with systolic phase timing and frontal theta (4-6 Hz) synchronization. The former activity was coupled to higher CD, as expected. However, the latter time-frequency activity was linked to responses timed to systole. These findings suggest that creative ideation unfolds through embodied cardiac-cortical coordination, whereby diastolic states are associated with flexible semantic exploration and alpha-related attentional dynamics, whereas systolic states are associated with exploitative persistence and theta-related control processes. This suggests interoceptive rhythms as temporal scaffolding that structures when and how ideas emerge, fundamentally expanding creativity neuroscience beyond purely cortical models.