This paper argues that cognitive experience is a psychological basis of intellectual giftedness and a type of representation (i.e., how an individual sees, understands, and interprets what is going on in the surrounding reality) is a proto-phenomenon of intellectual life of a person. The essay critiques existing approaches in psychology of giftedness, introduces our own approach, and presents an exploratory experimental psychological study comparing “gifted” high school students with “average” high school students in physics and mathematics.

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