The analysis of intuition: Processing fluency and affect in judgements of semantic coherence

Abstract

In semantic coherence judgements individuals are able to intuitively discriminate whether a word triad has a common remote associate (coherent) or not (incoherent) without consciously retrieving the common associate. A processing-fluency account for these intuitions is proposed, which assumes that (a) coherent triads are processed more fluently than incoherent triads, (b) this high fluency triggers a subtle positive affect, and (c) this affect may be experienced as a cognitive feeling and used in explicit judgement. In line with this account, it was shown that coherent triads (a) are processed faster than incoherent triads (Study 1), (b) serve as positive affective primes (Study 2), and (c) are liked more than incoherent triads (Study 3). When participants were provided with an irrelevant source of their affective reactions, they lost the ability to intuitively discriminate between coherent and incoherent triads (Study 4). Finally, an item-based analysis found that triads that are processed faster are liked more and are more likely to be judged coherent, irrespective of their actual coherence (Study 5).

Keywords:

• Intuition
• Semantic coherence judgements
• Processing fluency
• Affect

Acknowledgements

We thank Rolf Reber, Reed Hunt, and Pierre Perruchet, as well as two anonymous reviewers, for their valuable comments on earlier drafts of this paper. We also thank Roland Deutsch for his statistical advice. We thank Annette Bolte and Nicola Baumann for providing the stimulus set. We also thank Friederike Finger, Irina Trost, and Rebecca Spatz for their help in data collection.

Notes

¹An analysis using not the gains but rather the raw response latencies yielded a similar, but less pronounced pattern.

²The fact that not all triads that were solved were also judged coherent may require some additional explanation. Consider the paradigm here in which participants first gave their coherence judgement and were then given 5 additional seconds to come up with a solution word. In some cases, the participants neither felt the coherence nor retrieved the solution word by the time of the coherence judgement, but retrieved the solution word during the additional time.

³Note that this mediation analysis collapsed over all triads, that is both coherent and incoherent. Coherence of triads was controlled in each regression. Separate mediation analyses for coherent and incoherent triads yielded the same pattern, i.e., that fluency mediated the liking–intuition link.