I’m very much enjoying working on my dissertation. The field I have chosen is Cognitive Psychology and more specifically expert memory.
For over 40 years, chess players have been used to research theories of expert memory. This has been to try to decipher whether ‘experts’ in a field simply have a better memory than non-experts, or whether their chess education has helped them to develop subject specific techniques.
The path taken to my research idea was as follows:
1: I looked at the original research of Adriaan de Groot (1965), who looked at the differences in thought processes between the world’s elite, Grandmasters and National Masters by getting them to analyse positions and provide an ongoing commentary of what they were thinking.
2: My next step was to look at research into memory techniques. The first I came across was ‘Chunking’ – Chase & Simon (1973), who put forward the idea that a chess expert sees not individual pieces, but groups of pieces – These were termed ‘chunks’ and the authors reckoned that experts split positions into about seven of these.
3. The next significant idea was that of ‘Template Theory’ – Gobet and Simon (1996a), who claimed that the idea of chunks was too rigid. Their idea was that experts actually remember positions in two parts. The first part was termed ‘The core’, referring to perhaps the pawn structure. This part was identical to a chunk, in that an expert would memorise it exactly. The second part was called the ‘slot’, which referred to different piece configurations in and around the core.
4. The final key part of my preliminary research looked at the ‘Constraint Attunement Hypothesis’ – Vicente & Wang (1998). This theory stated that experts remember more, even in very random positions, because they are aware of various constraints surrounding any given chess position. Examples of this are that there are always two kings on the board and that pawns never appear on the first or eighth rank.
To test this idea, Gobet & Waters (2003) set up an experiment comparing Template Theory and the Constraint Attunement Hypothesis. This experiment tested experts and non-experts at memorising normal positions, positions with a certain percentage of the pieces scrambled and then ‘truly random’ positions. These were positions where the normal rules of chess were broken as in the examples given above.
The results were that experts still remembered significantly more of truly random positions than non-experts, although the percentage gap was smaller than on any other type of position. In their discussion section, Gobet & Waters (2003) hypothesised that the reason for this was that players of all levels could work out the absence of such constraints and that ‘ceteris paribus’, the experts superior use of Template Theory was the crucial factor.
Finally, they went onto discuss whether 'all' the constraints had been removed in their experiment and here is where my idea comes in! The authors pointed out that the pieces used are another possible constraint that should be tested. This is because most players, whatever their strength, have played in a tournament using the standard ‘Staunton’ pieces. Therefore my idea is simply to test whether memory and recall is affected by the types of pieces that the position is presented to the player on – simple!
For over 40 years, chess players have been used to research theories of expert memory. This has been to try to decipher whether ‘experts’ in a field simply have a better memory than non-experts, or whether their chess education has helped them to develop subject specific techniques.
The path taken to my research idea was as follows:
1: I looked at the original research of Adriaan de Groot (1965), who looked at the differences in thought processes between the world’s elite, Grandmasters and National Masters by getting them to analyse positions and provide an ongoing commentary of what they were thinking.
2: My next step was to look at research into memory techniques. The first I came across was ‘Chunking’ – Chase & Simon (1973), who put forward the idea that a chess expert sees not individual pieces, but groups of pieces – These were termed ‘chunks’ and the authors reckoned that experts split positions into about seven of these.
3. The next significant idea was that of ‘Template Theory’ – Gobet and Simon (1996a), who claimed that the idea of chunks was too rigid. Their idea was that experts actually remember positions in two parts. The first part was termed ‘The core’, referring to perhaps the pawn structure. This part was identical to a chunk, in that an expert would memorise it exactly. The second part was called the ‘slot’, which referred to different piece configurations in and around the core.
4. The final key part of my preliminary research looked at the ‘Constraint Attunement Hypothesis’ – Vicente & Wang (1998). This theory stated that experts remember more, even in very random positions, because they are aware of various constraints surrounding any given chess position. Examples of this are that there are always two kings on the board and that pawns never appear on the first or eighth rank.
To test this idea, Gobet & Waters (2003) set up an experiment comparing Template Theory and the Constraint Attunement Hypothesis. This experiment tested experts and non-experts at memorising normal positions, positions with a certain percentage of the pieces scrambled and then ‘truly random’ positions. These were positions where the normal rules of chess were broken as in the examples given above.
The results were that experts still remembered significantly more of truly random positions than non-experts, although the percentage gap was smaller than on any other type of position. In their discussion section, Gobet & Waters (2003) hypothesised that the reason for this was that players of all levels could work out the absence of such constraints and that ‘ceteris paribus’, the experts superior use of Template Theory was the crucial factor.
Finally, they went onto discuss whether 'all' the constraints had been removed in their experiment and here is where my idea comes in! The authors pointed out that the pieces used are another possible constraint that should be tested. This is because most players, whatever their strength, have played in a tournament using the standard ‘Staunton’ pieces. Therefore my idea is simply to test whether memory and recall is affected by the types of pieces that the position is presented to the player on – simple!
Now there is just the usual problem of trying to find enough volunteers!
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