Fig. 1: Overview of experimental design.

The study employed a higher-order learning paradigm comprising a creative exemplar-learning phase followed by a self-creating phase. During exemplar learning, participants underwent event-related fMRI while encoding creative exemplars for a set of target objects. Subsequently, they were unexpectedly instructed to generate novel creative ideas for the same objects—either outside the scanner (Exp. 1) or during scanning (Exp. 2). Exemplar-learning trials were retrospectively classified as higher subsequent creation (HSC) or lower subsequent creation (LSC) trials based on creativity ratings, enabling comparison of hippocampal representational dimensionality and hippocampal–prefrontal connectivity between trial types. In Exp. 2, joint analyses further quantified cross-phase transfer of hippocampal and prefrontal encoding from learning to creating. Supplementary experiments examined the promotive effects of exemplar-learning on creative performance (Exp. S1a–c); delineated hippocampal and prefrontal contributions to exemplar memory retrieval (Exp. S2), and examined the effects of exemplar remembering with or without episodic details (Exps. S3 and S4), and assessed the impact of incubation delays between learning and creating (Exps. S5–S7). HPC, hippocampus; IFG, inferior frontal cortex. Source data are provided as a Source Data file. Figure created in BioRender (Created in BioRender. Zhang, Z. 2025, https://BioRender.com/pgpmd7i).