The emergence of choice: Decision-making and strategic thinking through analogies

Consider the chess game: When faced with a complex scenario, how does understanding arise in one’s mind? How does one integrate disparate cues into a global, meaningful whole? how do humans avoid the combinatorial explosion? How are abstract ideas represented? The purpose of this paper is to propose a new computational model of human chess intuition and intelligence. We suggest that analogies and abstract roles are crucial to solving these landmark problems. We present a proof-of-concept model, in the form of a computational architecture, which may be able to account for many crucial aspects of human intuition, such as (i) concentration of attention to relevant aspects, (ii) \ud how humans may avoid the combinatorial explosion, (iii) perception of similarity at a strategic level, and (iv) a state of meaningful anticipation over how a global scenario \ud may evolve

Retrieval structures and schemata: A brief reply to Ericsson and Kintsch

In their commentary, Ericsson and Kintsch address several important issues. While I am more convinced than they are about the substantial similarities shared by our two approaches, and hence their comparability, this short reply will mostly limit itself to matters of disagreement

Multimodal Observation and Interpretation of Subjects Engaged in Problem Solving

In this paper we present the first results of a pilot experiment in the capture and interpretation of multimodal signals of human experts engaged in solving challenging chess problems. Our goal is to investigate the extent to which observations of eye-gaze, posture, emotion and other physiological signals can be used to model the cognitive state of subjects, and to explore the integration of multiple sensor modalities to improve the reliability of detection of human displays of awareness and emotion. We observed chess players engaged in problems of increasing difficulty while recording their behavior. Such recordings can be used to estimate a participant's awareness of the current situation and to predict ability to respond effectively to challenging situations. Results show that a multimodal approach is more accurate than a unimodal one. By combining body posture, visual attention and emotion, the multimodal approach can reach up to 93% of accuracy when determining player's chess expertise while unimodal approach reaches 86%. Finally this experiment validates the use of our equipment as a general and reproducible tool for the study of participants engaged in screen-based interaction and/or problem solving

Computational Modelling of Mental Imagery in Chess: A Sensitivity Analysis

An important aim of cognitive science is to build computational models that account for a large number of phenomena but have few free parameters, and to obtain more veridical values for the models’ parameters by successive approximations. A good example of this approach is the CHREST model (Gobet & Simon, 2000), which has simulated numerous phenomena on chess expertise and in other domains. In this paper, we are interested in the parameter the model uses for shifting chess pieces in its mind’s eye (125 ms per piece), a parameter that had been estimated based on relatively sparse experimental evidence. Recently, Waters and Gobet (2008) tested the validity of this parameter in a memory experiment that required players to recall briefly presented positions in which the pieces were placed on the intersections between squares. Position types ranged from game positions to positions where both the piece distribution and location were randomised. CHREST, which assumed that pieces must be centred back to the middle of the squares in the mind’s eye before chunks can be recognized, simulated the data fairly well using the default parameter for shifting pieces. The sensitivity analysis presented in the current paper shows that the fit was nearly optimal for all groups of players except the grandmaster group for which, counterintuitively, a slower shifting time gave a better fit. The implications for theory development are discussed