Recall memory for visually presented chess positions

Abstract

A series of three experiments replicated and extended earlier research reported by Chase and Simon (1973), de Groot (1965), and Charness (Note 1). The first experiment demonstrated that the relationship between memory for chess positions and chess skill varies directly with the amount of chess-specific information in the stimulus display. The second experiment employed tachistoscopic displays to incrementally "build" tournament chess positions by meaningful or nonmeaningful chunks and demonstrated that meaningful piece groupings during presentation markedly enhance subsequent recall performance. The third experiment tested memory for one of two positions presented in immediate sequence and demonstrated that explanations based on a limited-capacity short-term memory (Chase & Simon, 1973) are not adequate for explaining performance on this memory task.The game of chess provides a useful working environment for the analysis of specialized informationprocessing skills. Skill in chess is acquired only with extensive exposure to the game. From an analysis of verbal protocols, de Groot (1965) established that chess masters and less able players use similar thought processes in analyzing a complex chess position. They consider a similar number of moves (about 35), calculate to similar depths (about 7 plies), make the same number of fresh starts (about 7), and analyze a similar number of moves per minute (about 3). The only major difference de Groot noted was that the masters invariably analyzed stronger moves than the weaker players. This conclusion (i.e., better players are better because they select better moves) was not terribly illuminating.de Groot's (1965) research did indicate that masters differed from weaker players in their ability to recall a chess position from an unfamiliar game after it had been presented for only 5 sec. Masters recalled 93% of 22 pieces, while strong club players recalled about 51%. Chase and Simon (1973) have shown that this recall ability is chess specific by replicating de Groot's result and including a control condition in which the chess pieces were arranged randomly. With a 5-sec exposure of quiet middle-game positions, their master recalled 81% of the 22 pieces, while a novice recalled only 33%. With the randomized positions, all subjects recalled only three to five pieces correctly. This result indicates that the master and novice have similar visual memory capacities for nonmeaningful piece configurations. Thus, the ability to play chess well seems to depend on aThe design and interpretation of these experiments benefited greatly from discussions with Neil Charness, Eliot Hearst, Henry Helff, Michael Humphreys, and Benton J. Underwood. The authors thank Stanton Tripodis for data collection assistance in Experiment I. Reprint requests should be addressed to Peter Frey, Department of Psychology, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois 60201. learned perceptual skill rather than on the acquisition of a sophisticated problem-solvingstrategy. EXPERIMENT IOur first study attemp...

Expert memory: a comparison of four theories

“…Similar results were found by Frey and Adesman (1976), who used a different interfering task. Their subjects were confronted with two positions, presented in sequence for 8 s each, after which they had to count backward and aloud for 3 or 30 s. Finally, they had to reconstruct the first or the second position, without knowledge of which one was going to be chosen.…”

“…It has been shown that pieces presented at a rapid rate (about 2 s per piece) are better retained when they are presented according to the chunk relations proposed by Chase and Simon (1973a) than when they are presented by columns or randomly; this result holds for both verbal and visual presentation (Charness, 1974;Frey and Adesman 1976). Interestingly, chunk presentation yielded better recall than presentation of the entire position for the same total time (Frey & Adesman 1976).…”

“…The first explanation is Frey and Adesman's (1976) and Charness' (1976) depth of processing account, which proposes that, with experts, traces undergo a deep treatment that protects them against retroactive interference. The second explanation is similar to that of Cooke et al (1994), who propose that players encode one high-level description per position.…”

“…Results indicated only a small loss of performance when compared with a control condition where only one board was presented. A logical extension of Frey and Adesman's (1976) study of memory for either of two positions is to ask subjects to reconstruct both positions. This procedure has been extended up to five positions by Gobet and Simon (1996b), where boards were presented in short sequence for 5 s each, and up to nine positions by Cooke et al (1993), who used a presentation time of 8 s. Both teams found that, although there is a decrease in the percentage of pieces recalled correctly, the number of pieces recalled increased as a function of the number of boards presented.…”

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“…For example, in contrast to the usual assumptions about short-term memory, chess masters are relatively insensitive to interference tasks (Charness, 1976;Frey & Adesman, 1976) and can recall several boards that have been presented successively (Cooke, Atlas, Lane & Berger, 1993;Gobet & Simon, 1996a). In addition, Chase and Ericsson (1982) and Staszewski (1990) have shown that highly trained subjects can memorize up to 100 digits dictated at a brisk rate (1 second per digit).…”