Chess As A Way To Teach Thinking:

DeGroot (1946) found that chess masters could briefly look at a chess scene and then reconstruct it from memory, whereas less skilled players could place far fewer pieces. When given a board with pieces presented in random places, however, masters did no better than novices. This shows that the master player does not simply have a better memory; the master has a memory for meaningful configurations. Later Simon and Chase (1973) explained this phenomenon in terms of "chunking." At higher levels of knowledge, a person sees and manipulates information in larger chunks. A literate person, for example, can remember many letters if they are arranged in meaningful words and sentences, but not nearly as many if they are in a random list.

DeGroot's findings have been crucial in shaping how we think about cognition. In Search for Excel/ence, for example, Peters and Waterman (1982) quote the classic chess studies to show that the manager who thoroughly understands his or her organization will be better able to process information efficiently and thereby make superior judgments.

Citations: Horgan, D. (1987). Chess as a way to teach Thinking. Teaching, Thinking and Problem Solving, 9, 4-11.

A Functional MRI Study Of High-Level Cognition. I. The Game Of Chess

The game of chess has a long history in Western intellectual culture. In contrast to many forms of physical games, it taxes the mental resources of the player. Because of this role, the cognitive processes involved in the game of chess have intrigued psychologists for decades . Although there is a rich history of psychological investigations of chess playing, such as de Groot’s research on memory and expertise, there is very limited understanding of the neural bases of this complex process and what evidence does exist is sometimes contradictory. This dearth of findings in neuroscience is surprising given that chess has been the focus of ongoing artificial intelligence research for half a century, yet is understandable given that chess playing is a cognitive task that cannot be studied in nonhuman primates.

The pattern of activations in the Research is consistent with the involvement of a number of general cognitive processes in chess play. It also provides tentative answers to some important questions. It is reasonable to ask if chess is primarily a logical / computational skill or a spatial one. The high degree of activation in the parietal areas and the lack of activation in the left lateral frontal lobe, normally associated with traditional measures of intelligence and logical reasoning, are surprising and may suggest that chess cognition is primarily spatial. This inference is also supported by the high degree of activation in the occipital / parietal lobes, which may indicate preliminary spatial and visual processing. Conversely, it may also suggest that the parietal areas may be capable of more than just spatial orientations but also more complex spatial computations involving the interaction of stored knowledge and incoming spatial information. This interpretation is supported in part by research showing that areas of the parietal lobes are involved in numeric comparison and approximation, as well as complex spatial tasks such as mental rotation. Much of the activation in the parietal lobes could be related to the mental imagery involved in checking plausible moves, and the superior frontal areas may be involved in the maintenance and possibly the selection of spatial patterns within the posterior regions.

Citations: Atherton, M., Zhuang, J., Bart, W. M., Hu, X., & He, S. (2003). A functional MRI study of high-level cognition. I. The game of chess. Cognitive Brain Research, 16(1), 26-31.