Adaptive expert decision making: Skilled chess players search more and deeper

Previous research has suggested that depth of search in chess does not increase much as a function of skill. We submitted players to a problem-solving task with complex positions. We found a strong skill effect in depth of search, rate of search, and number of nodes generated. At the level of strong masters, the absolute values of these variables were much higher than in previous studies (sometimes 10 times higher). Supplementary data on memory, practice, reaction times, and time-constrained decision making (a maximum decision time of 10 seconds) indicated that players’ behaviour was consistent with the behaviour of players previously studied in the literature and with predictions of theories based on pattern recognition. Beyond adding support to the hypothesis that both the ability to search and pattern recognition are relevant aspects of expert thinking, these results are important in showing that previous research has vastly underestimated experts’ search potential. We conclude that long-term memory knowledge allows both extensive search and rapid evaluation when making decisions under time pressure. Players adaptively use either problem-solving method depending on the demands of the task

The role of domain-specific practice, handedness and starting age in chess

The respective roles of the environment and innate talent have been a recurrent question for research into expertise. This paper investigates markers of talent, environment, and critical period for the acquisition of expert performance in chess. Argentinian chessplayers (N = 104), ranging from weak amateurs to grandmasters, filled in a questionnaire measuring variables including individual and group practice, starting age, and handedness. The study reaffirms the importance of practice for reaching high levels of performance, but also indicates a large variability, the slower player needing eight times more practice to reach master level than the faster. Additional results show a correlation between skill and starting age, and indicate that players are more likely to be mixed-handed than individuals in the general population; however, there was no correlation between handedness and skill within the chess sample. Together, these results suggest that practice is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the acquisition of expertise, that some additional factors may differentiate between chessplayers and non-chessplayers, and that the starting age of practice is important

Intelligence and chess

The goal of this paper is to critically evaluate the evidence supporting the hypothesis that innate talent (for example a higher level of intelligence) may account for aspects of chess skill. We start by giving some standard definitions of intelligence, and then present empirical data on chessplayers’ intelligence, both with children and adults. In the second part of this paper, we discuss Geschwind and Galaburda’s (1985) influential theory of the neurobiology of talent in music, mathematics, and visual arts, and review evidence of its applicability for explaining chess expertise. For that purpose, we will present empirical data based on brain lesions, brain-imaging studies, and handedness. In the conclusion, we will attempt to reconcile the strand of research emphasising practice and the role of the environment with that emphasising the role of innate talent

The Role of Practice in Chess: A Longitudinal Study

We investigated the role of practice in the acquisition of chess expertise by submitting a questionnaire to 104 players of different skill levels. Players had to report their chess rating, the number of hours of individual and group practice, their use of different learning resources and activities, and whether they had been trained by a coach. The use of archival data enabled us to track the rating of some of the players throughout their career. We found that there was a strong correlation between chess skill and number of hours of practice. Moreover, group practice was a better predictor of high-level performance than individual practice. We also found that masters had a higher chess rating than expert players after only three years of serious dedication to chess, although there were no differences in the number of hours of practice. The difference that may explain the variation in rating is that masters start practising at an earlier age than experts. Finally, we found that activities such as reading books and using computer software (game databases, but not playing programs) were important for the development of high-level performance. Together with previous data and theories of expert performance, our results indicate limits in the deliberate practice framework and make suggestions on how best to carry out learning in chess and in other fields

The mind's eye in blindfold chess

Visual imagery plays an important role in problem solving, and research into blindfold chess has provided a wealth of empirical data on this question. We show how a recent theory of expert memory (the template theory, Gobet & Simon, 1996, 2000) accounts for most of these data. However, how the mind’s eye filters out relevant from irrelevant information is still underspecified in the theory. We describe two experiments addressing this question, in which chess games are presented visually, move by move, on a board that contains irrelevant information (static positions, semi-static positions, and positions changing every move). The results show that irrelevant information affects chess masters only when it changes during the presentation of the target game. This suggests that novelty information is used by the mind’s eye to select incoming visual information and separate “figure” and “ground.” Mechanisms already present in the template theory can be used to account for this novelty effect

Computational models of the development of perceptual expertise

In a recent article, Palmeri, Wong and Gauthier have argued that computational models may help direct hypotheses about the development of perceptual expertise. They support their claim by an analysis of models from the object-recognition and perceptual-categorization literatures. Surprisingly, however, they do not consider any computational models from traditional research into expertise, essentially the research deriving from Chase and Simon’s chunking theory, which itself was influenced by De Groot’s study of chessplayers. This is unfortunate, as a series of computational models based on perceptual chunking have explained a substantial number of phenomena related to expert behaviour and provide mechanisms that directly address the question of perceptual expertise

Structure and stimulus familiarity: A study of memory in chess-players with functional magnetic resonance imaging.

A grandmaster and an international chess master were compared with a group of novices in a memory task with chess and non-chess stimuli, varying the structure and familiarity of the stimuli, while functional magnetic resonance images were acquired. The pattern of brain activity in the masters was different from that of the novices. Masters showed no differences in brain activity when different degrees of structure and familiarity where compared; however, novices did show differences in brain activity in such contrasts. The most important differences were found in the contrast of stimulus familiarity with chess positions. In this contrast, there was an extended brain activity in bilateral frontal areas such as the anterior cingulate and the superior, middle, and inferior frontal gyri; furthermore, posterior areas, such as posterior cingulate and cerebellum, showed great bilateral activation. These results strengthen the hypothesis that when performing a domain-specific task, experts activate different brain systems from that of novices. The use of the expertsversus- novices paradigm in brain imaging contributes towards the search for brain systems involved in cognitive processes

Rise of human intelligence: Comments on Howard (1999)

Based upon the evidence that the best chessplayers in the world are becoming increasingly represented by relatively young individuals, Howard (1999) claimed that human intelligence is rising over generations. We suggest that this explanation has several difficulties, and show that alternative explanations relating to changes in the chess environment, including increased access to chess knowledge, offer better explanations for the increased presence of young players at top-level chess

Memory behavior requires knowledge structures, not memory stores

Since the inception of cognitive psychology dominant theories of memory behavior have used the storage metaphor. In the multi-store models (e.g., Broadbent, 1958; Atkinson and Shiffrin, 1968; Baddeley and Hitch, 1974) the memory system comprises one or more short-term memory (STM) stores and a long-term memory (LTM) store. These stores are places where information is located for varying periods of time (i.e., seconds in the STM stores, and minutes to lifetime in the LTM store) and they have varying capacity limits: large for the LTM store, very limited for the STM store—4 to 7 items, see Miller (1956), Broadbent (1958), and Cowan (2001)1. Expertise research has shown that experts are able to remember a large amount of information presented immediately before testing their memory (e.g., more than 80 items in Chase and Ericsson, 1982 and in Gobet and Simon, 1996), suggesting that they are superseding the normal capacity limits of the STM store. However, given that this effect only occurs with domain-specific material expertise theoreticians (e.g., Ericsson and Kintsch, 1995; Gobet and Simon, 1996) explained these results in terms of the use of retrieval structures (see explanation below), but they retained the partition between STM and LTM stores. In this article I adumbrate an alternative explanation that builds upon three sources: (i) the behaviorist conception of memory as behavior (Delaney and Austin, 1998); (ii) models of memory that exclude the STM store (e.g., Nairne, 1992; Fuster, 1997; Neath, 1998; Cowan, 1999; Oberauer, 2002; Conway et al., 2005; McClelland et al., 2010); (iii) Gobet and Simon's (1996) and Ericsson and Kintsch's (1995) emphasis on the role of expertise in memory, and their pioneer theoretical conceptualization of retrieval structures. In the remaining of the article I briefly discuss these three sources, and then I present the alternative explanation and draw some conclusions

Left lateralization in autobiographical memory: An fMRI study using the expert archival paradigm

In brain-imaging and behavioural research, studies of autobiographical memory have higher ecological validity than controlled laboratory memory studies. However, they also have less controllability over the variables investigated. Here we present a novel technique—the expert archival paradigm—that increases controllability while maintaining ecological validity. Stimuli were created from games played by two international-level chess masters. We then asked these two players to perform a memory task with stimuli generated from their own games and stimuli generated from other players’ games while they were scanned using fMRI. We found a left lateralised pattern of brain activity which was very similar in both masters. The brain areas activated were the left temporo-parietal junction and left frontal areas. The expert archival paradigm has the advantage of not requiring an interview to assess the participants’ autobiographical memories, and affords the possibility of measuring their accuracy of remembering as well as their brain activity related to remote and recent memories. It can also be used in any field of expertise, including arts, sciences and sports, in which archival data are available