INTUITION IN THE CONTEXT OF DISCOVERY

Most recent work concerned with intuition has emphasized the errors of intuitive judgment in the context of justification. The present research instead views intuition as informed judgment in the context of discovery. Two word tasks and a gestalt closure task were developed to investigate this concept of intuition. Two of these tasks demonstrated that people could respond discriminatively to coherence that they could not identify, and a third task demonstrated that this tacit perception of coherence guided people gradually to an explicit representation of it in the form of a hunch or hypothesis. While such hunches may surface quite suddenly into consciousness, we propose that the underlying cognitive processes which produce them are more continous than discontinuous in nature. Specifically, we argue that clues to coherence automatically activate the problem solver's relevant mnemonic and semantic networks. Eventually the level of patterned activation is sufficient to cross a threshold of consciousness, and at that point, it is represented as a hunch or hypothesis. The largely unconscious processes involved in generating hunches is quite different from the conscious processes required to test them-thereby vindicating the classical distinction between the context of discovery and the context of justification. © 1990.