Origins and Evolution of Imagination, From Australopithecus to Modern-Day Deep Learning

Where does imagination come from? How did it originate, and which organisms are capable of imagination? What deeper connections does imagination share with consciousness, survival, and the very essence of life? Across both scientific literature and public discourse, imagination is invoked to describe a wide range of phenomena, including artistic creativity, problem solving, symbolic thought, and mental imagery, much like the concept of consciousness, whose interpretation varies across theoretical perspectives. This conceptual breadth motivates the need for a more precise theoretical specification of imagination. In this Perspective, we update and extend prior work that formally specifies imagination as imaginative generativity (IG), a transdisciplinary theoretical construct describing the generative process through which organisms produce novel multisensory imaginings. Through IG, organisms can anticipate potential changes and challenges in their environments and guide internally guided actions. This generative capacity supports adaptive behavior that may extend beyond immediate individual survival to influence species-level development. The formal extension developed in this paper involves identifying the functional characteristics that distinguish imaginative/IG processes from related representational mechanisms such as vivid representing and mental imagery. Relative to our previous IG formulation, the present paper makes three specific contributions: it clarifies the distinction between vivid representing (VR) and imaginative generativity (IG), situates that distinction within an evolutionary and archaeological account of representational change, and uses contemporary AI systems as comparative cases for identifying restricted functional analogues of IG in the absence of reflective, self-awareness. The synthesis we offer uses the language of epistemology as an organizing infrastructure for the development of transdisciplinary theory. While imagination is intuitive, its study demands careful dismantling and re-examination of the underlying assumptions and grounding. Precedents for this methodology exist within psychology and consciousness studies; however, we additionally offer an integrative review to garner supporting evidence across neuroscience, biology, and cognitive science to refine contemporary understanding of imaginative processes and their relationship to cognition and consciousness.