Intimation as a potentially useful subjective human experience: Insights from cognitive psychology 100 years following Wallas’s (1926) The Art of Thought

Intimation is a rarely used term for the feeling of being on the verge of arriving at a problem's solution without yet identifying the solution. This use of the term can be traced back 100 years to Graham Wallas's (1926) book The Art of Thought. In the present review, we link Wallas's conceptualization of intimation with various theoretical constructs across multiple domains in cognitive psychology that may be converging on the same idea as Wallas had intended in his use of the term intimation. For example, theories of curiosity, such as the Region of Proximal Learning approach, posit that curiosity behaviors often arise from a feeling of almost knowing or discovering something. Also, the tip-of-the-tongue state-a feeling of being on the verge of accessing a word-can indicate the feeling of nearing a creative solution to a problem. We note that intimation is described by the French term presque vu, and in a rare study of presque vu, 98% of participants indicated experiencing it. We argue that intimation is a metacognitive experience that, even if not indicative of privileged near-access to an underlying problem solution, reflects a facet of human conscious experience that is worthy of study on its own. We further argue that intimation may serve as an important motivator to pursue problem solutions and that it is through this means that intimation likely plays an important role in human problem-solving ability, providing another reason why it should be considered an important focus of study within cognitive psychology.