Inflexibility of experts – Reality or myth? Quantifying the Einstellung effect in chess masters

How does the knowledge of experts affect their behaviour in situations that require unusual methods of dealing? One possibility, loosely originating in research on creativity and skill acquisition, is that an increase in expertise can lead to inflexibility of thought due to automation of procedures. Yet another possibility, based on expertise research, is that experts’ knowledge leads to flexibility of thought. We tested these two possibilities in a series of experiments using the Einstellung (set) effect paradigm. Chess players tried to solve problems that had both a familiar but non-optimal solution and a better but less familiar one. The more familiar solution induced the Einstellung (set) effect even in experts, preventing them from finding the optimal solution. The presence of the non-optimal solution reduced experts' problem solving ability was reduced to about that of players three standard deviations lower in skill level by the presence of the non-optimal solution. Inflexibility of thought induced by prior knowledge (i.e., the blocking effect of the familiar solution) was shown by experts but the more expert they were, the less prone they were to the effect. Inflexibility of experts is both reality and myth. But the greater the level of expertise, the more of a myth it becomes

Position criticality in chess endgames

Some 50,000 Win Studies in Chess challenge White to find an effectively unique route to a win. Judging the impact of less than absolute uniqueness requires both technical analysis and artistic judgment. Here, for the first time, an algorithm is defined to help analyse uniqueness in endgame positions objectively. The key idea is to examine how critical certain positions are to White in achieving the win. The algorithm uses sub-n-man endgame tables (EGTs) for both Chess and relevant, adjacent variants of Chess. It challenges authors of EGT generators to generalise them to create EGTs for these chess variants. It has already proved efficient and effective in an implementation for Starchess, itself a variant of chess. The approach also addresses a number of similar questions arising in endgame theory, games and compositions

Optimal Experience: An Analysis of Flow Among Intramural Officials at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville

The occurrence of flow in a number of leisure and sport activities has been well documented, yet the question of whether sports officials experience flow has not been addressed in the literature. The purpose of the current study was to investigate the occurrence and nature of flow among sport officials, specifically intramural officials. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with six University of Tennessee, Knoxville intramural officials. The interviews were transcribed by an independent transcriptionist; the data were reviewed, coded and analyzed using QDA Miner software. Subsequently, five themes emerged: (1) experience/expertise of crewmates and self; (2) motivation of crewmates and self; (3) pace of contest, (4) factors external to and within the contest; and (5) optimal experience. Significant findings of the study included: (1) more experienced officials are better able to handle game situations and serve as inspiring crewmates; (2) motivated individuals adhere to officiating mechanics, hustle, and show enthusiasm; (3) faster paced games can fluster less experienced officials, while veteran intramural officials handle game pace effectively; and (4) health and fitness, weather, personal troubles, and supervisors are factors external to the contest while fans, player behavior, and individual/crew performance are factors within the contest. In summary, the previously noted findings may have an influence on flow experiences for officials and aid in the management of intramural officiating crews

Information and Design: Book Symposium on Luciano Floridi’s The Logic of Information

Purpose – To review and discuss Luciano Floridi’s 2019 book The Logic of Information: A Theory of Philosophy as Conceptual Design, the latest instalment in his philosophy of information (PI) tetralogy, particularly with respect to its implications for library and information studies (LIS). Design/methodology/approach – Nine scholars with research interests in philosophy and LIS read and responded to the book, raising critical and heuristic questions in the spirit of scholarly dialogue. Floridi responded to these questions. Findings – Floridi’s PI, including this latest publication, is of interest to LIS scholars, and much insight can be gained by exploring this connection. It seems also that LIS has the potential to contribute to PI’s further development in some respects. Research implications – Floridi’s PI work is technical philosophy for which many LIS scholars do not have the training or patience to engage with, yet doing so is rewarding. This suggests a role for translational work between philosophy and LIS. Originality/value – The book symposium format, not yet seen in LIS, provides forum for sustained, multifaceted and generative dialogue around ideas

Visual Entailment: A Novel Task for Fine-Grained Image Understanding

Existing visual reasoning datasets such as Visual Question Answering (VQA), often suffer from biases conditioned on the question, image or answer distributions. The recently proposed CLEVR dataset addresses these limitations and requires fine-grained reasoning but the dataset is synthetic and consists of similar objects and sentence structures across the dataset. In this paper, we introduce a new inference task, Visual Entailment (VE) - consisting of image-sentence pairs whereby a premise is defined by an image, rather than a natural language sentence as in traditional Textual Entailment tasks. The goal of a trained VE model is to predict whether the image semantically entails the text. To realize this task, we build a dataset SNLI-VE based on the Stanford Natural Language Inference corpus and Flickr30k dataset. We evaluate various existing VQA baselines and build a model called Explainable Visual Entailment (EVE) system to address the VE task. EVE achieves up to 71% accuracy and outperforms several other state-of-the-art VQA based models. Finally, we demonstrate the explainability of EVE through cross-modal attention visualizations. The SNLI-VE dataset is publicly available at https://github.com/ necla-ml/SNLI-VE

SCRIPTKELL : a tool for measuring cognitive effort and time processing in writing and other complex cognitive activities

We present SCRIPTKELL, a computer-assisted experimental tool that makes it possible to measure the time and cognitive effort allocated to the subprocesses of writing and other cognitive activities, SCRIPTKELL was designed to easily use and modulate Kellogg's (1986) triple-task procedure,.which consists of a combination of three tasks: a writing task (or another task), a reaction time task (auditory signal detection), and a directed retrospection task (after each signal detection during writing). We demonstrate how this tool can be used to address several novel empirical and theoretical issues. In sum, SCRIPTKELL should facilitate the flexible realization of experimental designs and the investigation of critical issues concerning the functional characteristics of complex cognitive activities