Expertise and Intuition: A Tale of Three Theories

Abstract

Several authors have hailed intuition as one of the defining features of expertise. In particular, while disagreeing on almost anything that touches on human cognition and artificial intelligence, Hubert Dreyfus and Herbert Simon agreed on this point. However, the highly influential theories of intuition they proposed differed in major ways, especially with respect to the role given to search and as to whether intuition is holistic or analytic. Both theories suffer from empirical weaknesses. In this paper, we show how, with some additions, a recent theory of expert memory (the template theory) offers a coherent and wide-ranging explanation of intuition in expert behaviour. It is shown that the theory accounts for the key features of intuition: it explains the rapid onset of intuition and its perceptual nature, provides mechanisms for learning, incorporates processes showing how perception is linked to action and emotion, and how experts capture the entirety of a situation. In doing so, the new theory addresses the issues problematic for Dreyfus's and Simon's theories.Implications for research and practice are discussed. AcknowledgmentsWe are grateful to Stuart Dreyfus, Gary Klein, Pat Langley and Richard Smith for detailed comments on a previous version of this manuscript.

Intuitively detecting what is hidden within a visual mask: Familiar–novel discrimination and threat detection for unidentified stimuli

“…However, although it is inherently adaptive, this ability to have a general sense about an unidentifiable face or scene may actually be due to expertise. Many have noted that one of the key characteristics of expertise is the ability to rapidly recognize patterns or critical features of a situation, as when a chess expert instantly knows what the next move should be or an expert radiologist instantly determines that there is an abnormality present (see, e.g., Gobet & Chassy, 2009, for a review). Such "expert-based intuition" has been argued to be an important factor in effective decision-making within organizations (Salas, Rosen, & DiazGranados, 2010), and although the argument is controversial, some have indeed linked face processing with expertise (e.g., Gauthier & Bukach, 2007;Wong, Palmeri, & Gauthier, 2009).…”

“…Both intuition (e.g., Gobet & Chassy, 2009;Salas et al, 2010) and familiarity (e.g., Mandler, 2008) are described as a general sense about a stimulus or situation, without conscious access to specifics. Thus, intuition and familiarity may be intertwined.…”

Surveying Philosophers About Philosophical Intuition

“…Experienced philosophers will often intuitively grasp the solution and the course of the dialectic in a couple of turns of the debate. For arguments to this point in the context of chess, see De Groot (1986) and Gobet and Chassy (2009). the study and completed the online survey. As shown in Table 1 (Henceforth, all tables can be found in Appendix 1), a larger proportion of participants were male (74.1%), white (87.6%), and had been granted or were currently pursuing their highest degree in philosophy, predominantly in the USA or Canada (43%), Northern Europe (29.6%), and Australasia (21.6%).…”

Developing Intuition: Neural Correlates of Cognitive-Skill Learning in Caudate Nucleus

“…This automatic, quick process is largely unconscious in that the player cannot explain how the idea is generated and why it is the best. Psychological studies of chess and shogi have shown that the capability of this automatic, quick generation, which has been termed "intuition," is essential for the superior capability of expert players (De Groot, 1965Gobet and Chassy, 2009). In real games, experts do depend on conscious search in their selections of next moves, but their search procedures, supported by high intuitive capability, are much more effective.…”

“…As knowledge and experience accumulate, however, performance becomes smoother and can be executed with little conscious effort (Fitts and Posner, 1967;VanLehn, 1996). This unconscious capability of quick, automatic cognitive information processing is often referred to as intuition (De Groot, 1986;Klein, 2003;Gobet and Chassy, 2009). Psychological models have been proposed to account for the development of intuition (Simon and Chase, 1973;Anderson, 1982), but the validity of these models and their underlying neural basis are not yet established.…”