Part I: The Pre-Institutional Intelligence Problem Cognitive Foundations of Intelligence Before the Information Cycle

Intelligence studies has historically taken the institution as its unit of analysis: agencies, collection disciplines, and the information cycle that carries a signal from source to policymaker. This orientation leaves the moment before that cycle begins largely untheorized — the moment in which a single human observer, facing an ambiguous and unstructured environment, converts a diffuse signal into a working judgment. This paper argues that institutional intelligence presupposes this pre-institutional cognitive process, and that the process deserves to be an independent object of theoretical study. Drawing on intelligence studies, cognitive psychology, decision theory, situational awareness research, sensemaking, and epistemology, the paper develops a six-stage model — from raw environmental signal through selective perception, provisional cognitive modeling, hypothesis formation, decision, and, where an institution exists, entry into the formal intelligence cycle — and proposes a comparative historical-case and document-based methodology for testing it. The paper closes by drawing explicit boundaries around its claims: it does not posit privileged intuition, infallible perception, or any substitute for institutional verification; it is a theory of how estimation begins, not a guarantee of how it ends.