ABSTRACT
A ccording to the Oxford English Dictionary (https://www.oed.com), intuition is “the immediate apprehension of an object by the mind without the inter-vention of any reasoning process.’’ In general parlance, knowing something without knowing how you know it. Most people would agree that intuitive insights appear as ideas or feelings that subsequently guide their thought and behavior. However, the specic cognitive processes underlying such intuitive decisions are not clear yet nor is the role of learning processes and their contribution to intuitive responses. One possibility to approach this issue is to incorporate neuroscientic results. Researchers whose primary interest is in cognition may wonder why they should actually care about neuroscientic ndings. A short time ago, it was argued that knowing which parts of the brain light up during the processing of a specic task is not relevant for cognitive theory, nor does it expand theoretical concepts on cognition. However, knowing where in the brain processing takes place can tell researchers important potential correspondences between phenomenological different tasks, which might even be investigated in different parts of cognitive science. Likewise, imaging data can tell researchers whether small changes within one task can alter the strategy used by the participants on the basis of different areas activated. This circumstance is due to the fact that by now, brain areas can be characterized in terms of their role in implementing specic cognitive processes. Important to note is that this logic implies that the same brain area implements the same cognitive process regardless of the specic combination of processes realized in the actual task. Generally, the term process can be conceived of as referring to an operation or a set of operations that transforms an input into an output.
