Visuospatial abilities of chess players.

The extent to which the acquisition of expertise in knowledge-rich domains, such as chess, can be influenced by general individual characteristics, such as intelligence, has remained unclear. Some previous studies with children have documented significant correlations between chess skill and performance on some psychometric tests, such as performance IQ. However, we found no evidence for a correlation between chess skill and visual memory ability in a group of adult chess players (N = 36, age = 28.4 years). This finding, together with other data in the literature, suggests that there is surprisingly little evidence that chess skill and visuospatial ability are associated in adults. Thus, visual memory ability, and perhaps visuospatial intelligence, may be relatively unimportant factors in the long-term acquisition of chess skill.

[1]  Wayne S. Zimmerman,et al.  The Guilford-Zimmerman Aptitude Survey. , 1948 .

[2]  J. Guilford.  The Guilford‐Zimmerman Aptitude Survey , 1956 .

[3]  N. Tallent.  Psychological testing. , 1960, The American journal of nursing.

[4]  M. Albert,et al.  The Chess Mind , 1960 .

[5]  Leonard S. Cahen,et al.  Educational Testing Service , 1970 .

[6]  H. Simon,et al.  The mind's eye in chess. , 1973 .

[7]  W. Chase,et al.  Visual information processing. , 1974 .

[8]  H. Harman,et al.  Kit of factor-referenced cognitive tests , 1976 .

[9]  Deanna Kuhn,et al.  Development of the isolation of variables scheme in experimental and "natural experiment" contexts. , 1977 .

[10]  Jörg Doll,et al.  Intelligenz und Schachleistung—eine Untersuchung an Schachexperten. , 1987 .

[11]  A. Anastasi.  Psychological testing, 6th ed. , 1988 .

[12]  Jeffrey L. Cummings,et al.  The Exceptional Brain: Neuropsychology of Talent and Special Abilities , 1989 .

[13]  Dianne D. Horgan,et al.  Chess expertise in children , 1990 .

[14]  N. Charness.  The impact of chess research on cognitive science , 1992 .

[15]  M. Frydman,et al.  The general intelligence and spatial abilities of gifted young Belgian chess players. , 1992, British journal of psychology.

[16]  W. Schneider,et al.  Chess expertise and memory for chess positions in children and adults. , 1993, Journal of experimental child psychology.

[17]  Robert J. Crutcher,et al.  The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance. , 1993 .

[18]  Pertti Saariluoma,et al.  Location Coding in Chess , 1994 .

[19]  N. Charness,et al.  Expert Performance Its Structure and Acquisition , 2002 .

[20]  Pertti Saariluoma,et al.  Chess players' thinking : a cognitive psychological approach , 1995 .

[21]  H. Simon,et al.  Recall of random and distorted chess positions: Implications for the theory of expertise , 1996, Memory & cognition.

[22]  H. Simon,et al.  Recall of rapidly presented random chess positions is a function of skill , 1996, Psychonomic bulletin & review.

[23]  Herbert A. Simon,et al.  Templates in Chess Memory: A Mechanism for Recalling Several Boards , 1996, Cognitive Psychology.

[24]  Fernand Gobet,et al.  Perception and memory in chess: Heuristics of the professional eye , 1996 .

[25]  N. J. Mackintosh,et al.  IQ and human intelligence , 1998 .

[26]  H. Simon,et al.  Pattern recognition makes search possible: Comments on Holding (1992) , 1998 .

[27]  H. Simon,et al.  Expert chess memory: revisiting the chunking hypothesis. , 1998, Memory.

[28]  Robert W. Howard,et al.  Preliminary Real-World Evidence That Average Human Intelligence Really is Rising , 1999 .

[29]  Herbert A. Simon,et al.  Five seconds or sixty? Presentation time in expert memory , 2000, Cogn. Sci..

[30]  Fernand Gobet,et al.  The role of constraints in expert memory. , 2003, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.