Chess Experts Research Articles

Chess players' eye movements reveal rapid recognition of complex visual patterns: Evidence from a chess-related visual search task.

To explore the perceptual component of chess expertise, we monitored the eye movements of expert and novice chess players during a chess-related visual search task that tested anecdotal reports that a key differentiator of chess skill is the ability to visualize the complex moves of the knight piece. Specifically, chess players viewed an array of four minimized chessboards, and they rapidly searched for the target board that allowed a knight piece to reach a target square in three moves. On each trial, there was only one target board (i.e., the "Yes" board), and for the remaining "lure" boards, the knight's path was blocked on either the first move (the "Easy No" board) or the second move (i.e., "the Difficult No" board). As evidence that chess experts can rapidly differentiate complex chess-related visual patterns, the experts (but not the novices) showed longer first-fixation durations on the "Yes" board relative to the "Difficult No" board. Moreover, as hypothesized, the task strongly differentiated chess skill: Reaction times were more than four times faster for the experts relative to novices, and reaction times were correlated with within-group measures of expertise (i.e., official chess ratings, number of hours of practice). These results indicate that a key component of chess expertise is the ability to rapidly recognize complex visual patterns.

The Neuroscience of Moral Judgment and Aquinas on Moral Expertise

The Neuroscience of Moral Judgment and Aquinas on Moral Expertise Stephen Napier CONTEMPORARY MORAL psychology is discovering some unflattering aspects of our moral intuitions. Quite simply, they are unreliable, or, at least, we have every reason to think that our intuitions are not attuned to morally relevant features of our environment. Because moral intuitions are the starting point for a person's moral judgments and reasoning, faulty intuitions can affect someone's entire system of moral beliefs. What is more, the agent whose beliefs result from these faulty intuitions would not know otherwise. As E. F. Schumacher reminded us,1 just as by the eye one can see everything except the eye through which one sees, so the moral eye can see everything except the eye through which it sees. The same is true for whole systems of moral beliefs according to which everything looks okay "from the inside" or from the perspective of the agent, but, viewed sideways on, a moral belief system may be radically disordered. This paper attempts to put contemporary cognitive science of moral judgment into conversation with Aquinas's moral epistemology. Aquinas has provided us with a cognitive therapy for our moral intuitions, one that stands as a viable remedy for the problem of faulty intuitions. My goal here is to explain why and how his moral epistemology addresses the problem of faulty intuitions. A more ambitious goal would be to argue that his [End Page 31] solution is the best solution to our epistemic predicament. Though in fact I think this is the case, I cannot argue for it here. The first section aims to highlight the problem contemporary moral psychology is discovering about our moral intuitions. The second section outlines and explains Aquinas's solution to this problem. I explain this in two stages. First, I show that Aquinas's solution to the problem of faulty intuitions is only partly the acquisition of the requisite virtues. Full rehabilitation of our moral intellects requires realizing the gifts of the Holy Spirit—in particular, understanding, knowledge, wisdom, and counsel. In the second stage I explain why the virtues and gifts are solutions to our problem. To understand why they are necessary we must understand how they operate on our moral intellects. Here I advert to recent work done on other areas of expertise with an eye toward finding family resemblances between expertise in chess and other domains, and moral expertise. We can appreciate better why the virtues and gifts are necessary if we have some grasp of how they are supposed to work, and we can see this on analogy with other forms of expertise. I. The Problem The following nomenclature will provide the framework for the remainder of our discussion. The term "intuition" in philosophy has a rather diverse meaning. Following Elijah Chudnoff2 and William Tolhurst,3 I understand intuition to mean something like an intellectual seeming analogous to a perceptual seeming. To use Aquinas's terminology, an intuition is something like an apprehension according to which "the intellect merely has a likeness of a thing existing outside the soul, as a sense has a likeness when it receives the species of a sensible thing. But when the intellect begins to judge about the thing it has apprehended, then its judgment is something proper [End Page 32] to itself."4 An intuition may be taken as an apprehension of something qua kind or species. Intuitions are intentional states in that they are about the world—"world" understood to include the perceptual environment, mathematical world, or the world of values and goods. They have a mind-to-world direction of fit, which means that they are representations of how the world actually is, or appears to be. But intuitions, as understood here, are not beliefs. One can have an intuition—a seeming—that, for example, the Muller-Lyer Illusion indicates two lines of different lengths. Click for larger view View full resolution Upon being informed that this is an illusion and/or measuring the lines, any subsequent viewing of the Muller-Lyer lines will involve a seeming that they are different lengths, but one would not believe them to be different lengths...

Gender, Competition and Performance: Evidence from Real Tournaments

There is a growing literature looking at how men and women respond differently to competition. We contribute to this literature by studying gender differences in performance in a high-stakes and male dominated competitive environment, expert chess tournaments. Our findings show that women under-perform compared to men of the same ability and that the gender composition of games drives this effect. Using within player variation in the conditionally random gender of their opponent, we find that women earn significantly worse outcomes against male opponents. We examine the mechanisms through which this effect operates by using a unique measure of within game quality of play. We find that the gender composition effect is driven by women playing worse against men, rather than by men playing better against women. The gender of the opponent does not affect a male player’s quality of play. We also find that men persist longer against women before resigning. These results suggest that the gender composition of competitions affects the behavior of both men and women in ways that are detrimental to the performance of women. Lastly, we study the effect of competitive pressure and find that players’ quality of play deteriorates when stakes increase, though we find no differential effect over the gender composition of games.

Number processing ability is connected to longitudinal changes in multiplayer online battle arena skill

The popularity of multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) games provides an opportunity to examine how cognitive skills are linked with changes in player performance within a team-based game genre. There is evidence that video game experience in other genres is connected with specific cognitive skills such as visuospatial attention and working memory capacity. Links have also been observed outside of video games such as numerical intelligence being correlated with the performance of chess experts. In the present study, we investigated whether numerical and working memory ability measured at an initial time-point predicted changes in MOBA skill and gameplay frequency measured five months later. We observed that participants who scored higher on a number processing task had greater improvements in MOBA skill and that this link depended on the social context of the gameplay. Specifically, numerical skill was linked to player rankings generated from matches where they were paired with random individuals; no connection was observed with gameplay that took place with a familiar set of teammates. The results of the present study extend previous research indicating video gameplay is linked to specific cognitive skills, in the case of MOBAs being numerical processing. We suggest that the difference in the connection with number ability to gameplay with novel and familiar players is in line with evidence that the importance of individual performance and the sense of achievement can be reduced in team settings. We suggest that future research should examine what types of quantitative abilities are indicative of MOBA skill and the impact of those factors relative to social skills.

Revisiting the Role of the Fusiform Face Area in Expertise.

The fusiform face area (FFA) is considered to be a highly specialized brain module because of its central importance for face perception. However, many researchers claim that the FFA is a general visual expertise module that distinguishes between individual examples within a single category. Here, I circumvent the shortcomings of some previous studies on the FFA controversy by using chess stimuli, which do not visually resemble faces, together with more sensitive methods of analysis such as multivariate pattern analysis. I also extend the previous research by presenting chess positions, complex scenes with multiple objects, and their interrelations to chess experts and novices as well as isolated chess objects. The first experiment demonstrates that chess expertise modulated the FFA activation when chess positions were presented. In contrast, single chess objects did not produce different activation patterns among experts and novices even when the multivariate pattern analysis was used. The second experiment focused on the single chess objects and featured an explicit task of identifying the chess objects but failed to demonstrate expertise effects in the FFA. The experiments provide support for the general expertise view of the FFA function but also extend the scope of our understanding about the function of the FFA. The FFA does not merely distinguish between different exemplars within the same category of stimuli. More likely, it parses complex multiobject stimuli that contain numerous functional and spatial relations.

Expert performance of men and women: A cross-cultural study in the chess domain

There is a persistent higher performance of men over women in chess that has been attributed to the disproportioned participation rates of men and women in this domain, but also to biological and cultural factors. This study addresses the disparity between men and women in performance at the expert chess level. Actual sex differences in chess performance were contrasted with differences estimated from the divergent participation rates of men and women chess players from twenty-four countries in the Eurasian region. There was a male advantage in chess performance throughout all countries. Sex differences in chess performance emerged for all the studied countries, with remarkable and highly variable unexplained gaps that were unrelated to the men versus women ratios. The cross-country variability about sex differences in chess performance indicates differences in geographical and cultural factors that might elicit differential participation rates, starting age, and perseverance in the domain for men and women. These differences are also likely to underlie the remarkable disparity in expert chess performance of men and women than only differential participation rates.

There Is Time for Calculation in Speed Chess, and Calculation Accuracy Increases With Expertise.

The recognition-action theory of chess skill holds that expertise in chess is due primarily to the ability to recognize familiar patterns of pieces. Despite its widespread acclaim, empirical evidence for this theory is indirect. One source of indirect evidence is that there is a high correlation between speed chess and standard chess. Assuming that there is little or no time for calculation in speed chess, this high correlation implies that calculation is not the primary factor in standard chess. Two studies were conducted analyzing 100 games of speed chess. In Study 1, we examined the distributions of move times, and the key finding was that players often spent considerable time on a few moves. Moreover, stronger players were more likely than weaker players to do so. Study 2 examined skill differences in calculation by examining poor moves. The stronger players made proportionally fewer blunders (moves that a 2-ply search would have revealed to be errors). Overall, the poor moves made by the weaker players would have required a less extensive search to be revealed as poor moves than the poor moves made by the stronger players. Apparently, the stronger players are searching deeper and more accurately. These results are difficult to reconcile with the view that speed chess does not allow players time to calculate extensively and call into question the assertion that the high correlation between speed chess and standard chess supports recognition-action theory.

Risk taking in adversarial situations: Civilization differences in chess experts

The projections of experts in politics predict that a new world order will emerge within two decades. Being multipolar, this world will inevitably lead to frictions where civilizations and states will have to decide whether to risk conflict. Very often these decisions are informed if not taken by experts. To estimate risk-taking across civilizations, we examined strategies used in 667,599 chess games played over eleven years by chess experts from 11 different civilizations. We show that some civilizations are more inclined to settle for peace. Similarly, we show that once engaged in the battle, the level of risk taking varies significantly across civilizations, the boldest civilization using the riskiest strategy about 35% more than the most conservative civilization. We discuss which psychological factors might underpin these civilizational differences.

Recall of briefly presented chess positions and its relation to chess skill.

Individual differences in memory performance in a domain of expertise have traditionally been accounted for by previously acquired chunks of knowledge and patterns. These accounts have been examined experimentally mainly in chess. The role of chunks (clusters of chess pieces recalled in rapid succession during recall of chess positions) and their relations to chess skill are, however, under debate. By introducing an independent chunk-identification technique, namely repeated-recall technique, this study identified individual chunks for particular chess players. The study not only tested chess players with increasing chess expertise, but also tested non-chess players who should not have previously acquired any chess related chunks in memory. For recall of game positions significant differences between players and non-players were found in virtually all the characteristics of chunks recalled. Size of the largest chunks also correlates with chess skill within the group of rated chess players. Further research will help us understand how these memory encodings can explain large differences in chess skill.

Expert vs. novice differences in the detection of relevant information during a chess game: evidence from eye movements.

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.

The architecture of the chess player׳s brain

The game of chess can be seen as a typical example for an expertise task requiring domain-specific training and experience. Despite intensive behavioural studies the neural underpinnings of chess performance and expertise are not entirely understood. A few functional neuroimaging studies have shown that expert chess players recruit different psychological functions and activate different brain areas while they are engaged in chess-related activities. Based on this functional literature, we predicted to find morphological differences in a network comprised by parietal and frontal areas and especially the occipito-temporal junction (OTJ), fusiform gyrus, and caudate nucleus. Twenty expert chess players and 20 control subjects were investigated using voxel-based and surface-based morphometry as well as diffusion tensor imaging. Grey matter volume and cortical thickness were reduced in chess players compared with those of control men in the OTJ and precunei. The volumes of both caudate nuclei were not different between groups, but correlated inversely with the years of chess playing experience. Mean diffusivity was increased in chess players compared with that of controls in the left superior longitudinal fasciculus and the Elo score (a chess tournament ranking) was inversely related to mean diffusivity within the right superior longitudinal fasciculus. To the best of our knowledge we showed for the first time that there are specific differences in grey and white matter morphology between chess players and control subjects in brain regions associated with cognitive functions important for playing chess. Whether these anatomical alterations are the cause or consequence of the intensive and long-term chess training and practice remains to be shown in future studies.

Understanding expertise and non-analytic cognition in fingerprint discriminations made by humans.

As a novice in a particular domain, thecognitive feats that experts are capable ofperformingseemimpressive,evenextraor-dinary. According to the well-establishedexemplar theory of categorization (e.g.,Brooks, 1987; Medin and Ross, 1989), anew category member in everyday clas-sification (e.g., a bird, a table, or a car)or expert classification (e.g., an abnor-mal chest x-ray, a patient with myocardialischaemia, or a poor chess move) is cat-egorized on the basis of its similarity toindividual prior cases. Often this sensitiv-ity develops effortlessly and without anyintention to learn similarities or differ-ences among the exemplars.Experts can do a lot with a little. Acrossvariousdomainsofexpertise,itseemsthatexperts can perform quickly and accu-rately when given only a small amountof information, as in chess (Gobet andCharness, 2006); fireground command(Klein, 1998); radiology (Myles-Worsleyet al., 1988; Evans et al., 2013), and der-matology(Normanetal.,1989).Theexpe-riential knowledge based on the hundredsof thousands of prior instances serves as arich source of analogies to permit efficientproblem solving.A fruitful approach to understand-ing these cognitive feats has been tounderstand where expertise lies in var-ious domains. Expertise in ball sports,for example, seems to lie in anticipatingwhere the ball will be (Abernethy, 1991);expertise in wine seems to lie in apply-ing verbal labels (Hughson and Boakes,2001); expertise in radiology seems to liein rapid discrimination of normal andabnormalradiographs(Evansetal.,2013);and expertise in chess seems lie in rapidretrieval of board configurations frommemory (Chase and Simon, 1973).Over the last several years, we havebeen working with a fascinating groupof experts who spend several hours aday examining a highly structured set ofimpressions. When a fingerprint is foundat a crime scene it is a human exam-iner, not a machine, who is faced withthe task of identifying the person wholeft it. Professional fingerprint examin-ers are usually sworn police officers whouse image enhancement tools, such asPhotoshop or a physical magnifying glass,and database tools to provide a list ofpossible matching candidates. They placea crime scene print and a suspect printside-by-side—physically or on a computerscreen—andvisuallycomparetheprintstojudge whether the prints came from thesame person or two different people.These fingerprint examiners have tes-tified in court for over one hundredyears, but there have been few experi-ments directly investigating the extent towhich experts can correctly match fin-gerprints to one another, how competentandproficientfingerprintexpertsare,howexaminersmaketheirdecisions,orthefac-tors that affect performance (Loftus andCole, 2004; Saks and Koehler, 2005; Vokeyet al., 2009; Spinney, 2010b; Thompsonet al., 2013a). Indeed, many examinershave even claimed that fingerprint iden-tification is infallible (Federal Bureau ofInvestigation, 1984). Academics, judges,scientists, and US Senators have reportedon the absence of solid scientific prac-tices in the forensic sciences. They high-lighttheabsenceofexperimentsonhumanexpertise in forensic pattern matching,suggesting that faulty analyses may becontributing to wrongful convictions ofinnocent people (Edwards, 2009; NationalResearch Council, 2009; Campbell, 2011;Carle, 2011; Expert Working Group onHuman Factors in Latent Print Analysis,2012; Maxmen, 2012), and they lamentthe lack of a research culture in the foren-sic sciences (Mnookin et al., 2011). Thefield of forensics is, however, beginning toacknowledge the central role that falliblehumans play in the identification process(Tangen, 2013).Our first point of inquiry was to seewhether qualified, court practicing finger-print examiners are any more accuratethan the person on the street, and to get afeelforthekindsoferrorsexaminersmake.In our first experiment (Tangen et al.,2011), we tested the matching accuracyof fingerprint examiners from Australianstateandfederallawenforcementagencies.In a signal detection paradigm, we cre-ated ground-truth matching prints for useas targets, and highly-similar, nonmatch-ing prints from a national database searchfor use as distractors. We found that qual-ified, court-practicing fingerprint expertswere exceedingly accurate compared withnovices. Experts tended to err on the sideof caution by making more errors of thesort that could allow a guilty person toescape detection than errors of the sortthat could falsely incriminate an inno-cent person. A similar experiment, withparticipants from the US Federal Bureauof Investigation, produced similar results(Uleryetal.,2011),andafollow-upexper-iment found variability in the consistencywithin and between examiners’ decisions(Ulery et al., 2012). An examiner’s exper-tise seems to lie, not in matching prints

Responsibility judgments of wins and losses in the 2013 chess championship

AbstractWe report two studies on the perceived responsibility of opponents competing for a goal that can be attained by only one of them. Responsibility judgments were collected in seven samples of lay people and experts before, during, and after the World Chess Championship in 2013. Participants assessed the responsibility of the two players, their supporting teams, local conditions, and chance factors for four hypothetical outcomes (large and small loss/win for each player), along with probabilities for these outcomes, demonstrating subadditivity (sums exceeding 100%) in all samples, even among chess experts. The winner was consistently perceived to be more responsible than the loser, and more for outcomes with large than small margins. There was also an effect of focal player, as Carlsen was given more responsibility both for losses and wins than Anand, by the present (Norwegian) pro-Carlsen samples. However, this effect could be modified by describing the outcomes as Anand’s (rather than Carlsen’s) wins and losses. Thus the study adds to the valence framing literature by showing how responsibility judgments are affected by the way outcomes are framed.

It might happen in the very beginning. Reply to Ericsson

In his response to criticisms Ericsson argues that conclusions about expertise development cannot be drawn from studies in the general population, and that it is possible that, in chess, intelligence and expertise are uniformly related across development. We respond here that if we want to study the development of expertise across the lifespan, research needs to take into account samples from the general population, such as novices. Moreover, studies in the general population are needed to study a factor that might have troubled previous research in the field and therefore might have implications for current theories of expertise development, which is a possible restriction of range in crucial variables such as intelligence. We argue for a longitudinal, multifaceted approach to study expertise development, starting with unselected samples of novices and taking into account practice, intelligence and motivation simultaneously, to prevent restriction of range and allow for further and stronger conclusions on the relation between intelligence and chess expertise.

The enigma of Bálint's syndrome: neural substrates and cognitive deficits

The enigma of Bálint's syndrome: neural substrates and cognitive deficits

The role of intelligence for performance in the prototypical expertise domain of chess

Prominent expertise researchers have repeatedly emphasized that individual differences in general cognitive abilities, in particular intelligence, do not play any role for the attained level of expertise in a given domain. This strong claim is opposed with the current body of evidence on the relevance of intelligence for expert performance in the prototypical expertise domain of chess. Although the findings are not unequivocal, presumably due to methodological aspects, several studies employing psychometric tests of intelligence have revealed that expert chess players display significantly higher intelligence than controls and that their playing strength is related to their intelligence level. In addition, by using the extended expert–novice paradigm (comparing experts with novices of different intelligence levels) it has been found that both, expertise and intelligence impact on the performance in expertise-related tasks. These studies suggest that expert chess play does not stand in isolation from intelligence and could stimulate interdisciplinary research on the role of general cognitive abilities in expertise development.

Practice, intelligence, and enjoyment in novice chess players: A prospective study at the earliest stage of a chess career

Previous studies have generally found no relation between IQ and chess skill in chess experts. This lack of a relation could be due to the influence of practice being more important than IQ in chess expertise. An alternative explanation is that IQ is relatively high and might therefore be restricted in range in chess experts. The current study investigated the contribution of practice, IQ and motivation to chess performance prospectively in a group of young, novice chess players in which IQ restriction of range did not play a role. Children who entered their first chess course were asked to complete weekly diaries indicating the amount of practice and their enjoyment of the course. IQ and motivation were measured using standardized tests. Using path analysis, we found that IQ and practice independently predicted chess performance on a chess test at the end of the course. Motivation influenced performance indirectly, by moderating the amount of practice that was undertaken. The results indicate that, at the early stages of expertise development, IQ and motivation influence chess performance.

The Role of Memory Templates in Experts’ Strategic Thinking

There is ample evidence that experts’ performance is mostly due to domain specific knowledge. Some complex memory structures, termed templates, have been theorised to underpin strategic thinking in expert chess players. A behavioural study and computer simulations have been used to test this hypothesis. The behavioural study is the first to show that experts identify strategic systems with more accuracy than novices do. A new artificial neural network model is introduced to implement visuospatial templates. The simulations indicate that templates adequately model identification of strategies in novice and expert players. Both results support the view that templates underpin strategic thinking. The findings constitute a demonstration of the dependence of strategic thinking on memory processes and open the door for a new theoretical approach to understand high-level cognition.

Beauty queens and battling knights: Risk taking and attractiveness in chess

We explore the relationship between attractiveness and risk taking in chess. We use a large international panel dataset on high-level chess competitions which includes a control for the players’ skill in chess. This data is combined with results from a survey on an online labor market where participants were asked to rate the photos of 626 expert chess players according to attractiveness. Our results suggest that male chess players choose significantly riskier strategies when playing against an attractive female opponent, even though this does not improve their performance. Women's strategies are not affected by the attractiveness of the opponent.

The temporo-parietal junction contributes to global gestalt perception—evidence from studies in chess experts

In a recent neuroimaging study the comparison of intact vs. disturbed perception of global gestalt indicated a significant role of the temporo-parietal junction (TPJ) in the intact perception of global gestalt (Huberle and Karnath, 2012). This location corresponded well with the areas known to be damaged or impaired in patients with simultanagnosia after stroke or due to neurodegenerative diseases. It was concluded that the TPJ plays an important role in the integration of individual items to a holistic percept. Thus, increased BOLD signals should be found in this region whenever a task calls for the integration of multiple visual items. Behavioral experiments in chess experts suggested that their superior skills in comparison to chess novices are partly based on fast holistic processing of chess positions with multiple pieces. We thus analyzed BOLD data from four fMRI studies that compared chess experts with chess novices during the presentation of complex chess-related visual stimuli (Bilalić et al., 2010, 2011a,b, 2012). Three regions of interests were defined by significant TPJ clusters in the abovementioned study of global gestalt perception (Huberle and Karnath, 2012) and BOLD signal amplitudes in these regions were compared between chess experts and novices. These cross-paradigm ROI analyses revealed higher signals at the TPJ in chess experts in comparison to novices during presentations of complex chess positions. This difference was consistent across the different tasks in five independent experiments. Our results confirm the assumption that the TPJ region identified in previous work on global gestalt perception plays an important role in the processing of complex visual stimulus configurations.