Abstract
The present study explored the ability of expert and novice chess players to rapidly distinguish between regions of a chessboard that were relevant to the best move on the board, and regions of the board that were irrelevant. Accordingly, we monitored the eye movements of expert and novice chess players, while they selected white's best move for a variety of chess problems. To manipulate relevancy, we constructed two different versions of each chess problem in the experiment, and we counterbalanced these versions across participants. These two versions of each problem were identical except that a single piece was changed from a bishop to a knight. This subtle change reversed the relevancy map of the board, such that regions that were relevant in one version of the board were now irrelevant (and vice versa). Using this paradigm, we demonstrated that both the experts and novices spent more time fixating the relevant relative to the irrelevant regions of the board. However, the experts were faster at detecting relevant information than the novices, as shown by the finding that experts (but not novices) were able to distinguish between relevant and irrelevant information during the early part of the trial. These findings further demonstrate the domain-related perceptual processing advantage of chess experts, using an experimental paradigm that allowed us to manipulate relevancy under tightly controlled conditions.
Highlights
The remarkable perceptual skill of experts is exemplified by expert radiologists who can detect abnormalities in chest X-rays that were briefly presented for only 200 ms (Kundel and Nodine, 1975), and by chess experts who can memorize chessboards that were presented for only a few seconds (De Groot, 1946, 1965; Chase and Simon, 1973a,b)
While examining visual displays that require multiple eye fixations for encoding, experts are adept at rapidly focusing their attention on relevant areas, such that radiologists can rapidly fixate on abnormalities (Kundel et al, 2008), and chess experts can rapidly fixate on the best move on a chessboard (Charness et al, 2001)
To provide a theoretical account of the perceptual skill shown by chess experts, Chase and Simon (1973a,b) proposed that through thousands of hours of practice chess experts acquire memories for a large number of “chunks,” which consist of groups of chess pieces, and these chunks are supplemented by larger memory structures called templates (Gobet and Simon, 1996, 2000)
Summary
The remarkable perceptual skill of experts is exemplified by expert radiologists who can detect abnormalities in chest X-rays that were briefly presented for only 200 ms (Kundel and Nodine, 1975), and by chess experts who can memorize chessboards that were presented for only a few seconds (De Groot, 1946, 1965; Chase and Simon, 1973a,b). The chess domain provides numerous methodological advantages, such as well-segmented visual stimuli for eye movement interest areas, and an official rating system for objectively quantifying levels of expertise (Elo, 1965, 1986) Capitalizing on these methodological advantages, chess expertise has been linked to numerous perceptual processing advantages, including superior memory performance for briefly presented chessboards (De Groot, 1946, 1965; Chase and Simon, 1973a,b), the ability to process chess configurations automatically and in parallel (Reingold et al, 2001b), and a larger visual span such that experts process larger configurations of pieces than novices (Reingold et al, 2001a). These studies indicate that chess experts are more efficient at encoding chess configurations during a choose-a-move task
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
