Visuospatial and articulatory interference in chess players' information intake

Abstract

Modularity of the human information processing system has been widely accepted. Research based on this theoretical construction has been successful in many areas of cognitive psychology. Surprisingly little work has, however, been done towards understanding the consequences of modularity in thinking skills. In this paper the functions of visuospatial and articulatory processing will be compared in the context of chess skill to obtain information concerning the cognitive resources needed in this skill. Two experiments on chess players' information intake will be made, in which the effects of visuospatial and an articulatory secondary tasks will be compared. In both experiments a visuospatial secondary task causes strong interference, while an articulatory task has no effect on processing. So chess is a highly visual task but articulation, contrary to some pre-theoretical beliefs, has no real significance.Many theoreticians have argued for the modularity of mind, i.e. for its composition into separate but cooperating subsystems (Allport

Sherlock Holmes – an expert's view of expertise

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Time Spent Thinking in Online Chess Reflects the Value of Computation

“…This robustness to a variety of approaches suggests that what our measured benefit of computation captures is not specific to computation by Stockfish, but rather extends toward more general decision-tree search. A range of work modeling human decisions in multistep planning tasks (Huys et al, 2012(Huys et al, , 2015)), multiplayer board games (van Opheusden et al, 2021), and also using think out-loud paradigms in chess (Campitelli & Gobet, 2004;De Groot, 1946;Saariluoma, 1992) suggests that human computation utilizes similar search processes, thus supporting the validity of our approximation.…”

Expert memory: a comparison of four theories

“…According to SEEK, a large part of chessplayers' memory is encoded verbally. Empirical data (Charness, 1974;Robbins et al, 1995;Saariluoma, 1992) clearly refute this claim, and show that visuo-spatial encoding plays a much more important role. SEEK has little to say about the sorts of recoding present in Chase and Simon's (1973b) and Saariluoma's (1991) experiments.…”