Chase and Simon 1973

Chase, William G., and Herbert A. Simon. 1973. "Perception in chess." Cognitive Psychology.

Develops a technique for isolating and studying perceptual structures chess players perceive. Three chess players of varying strength (from master to novice) were confronted with the following tasks:

• A perception task, where players reproduce a chess position in plain view
• de Groot's (1965) short-term recall task, where players reproduce a chess position after viewing it for five seconds

Successive glances at the position in the perceptual task and long pauses in the memory task were used to segment structures in the reconstruction protocol. Size and nature of structures were analyzed as a function of chess skill (page 55).

Given a perception task and a memory task from a briefly exposed position, chess players of varying strength extract different amounts of information according to their strength. Superior performance of stronger players depends on their ability "to encode the position into larger perceptual chunks, each consisting of a familiar subconfiguration of pieces." There is evidence that pieces converging on the opponent's king (or other) position are chunked in a more abstract attack relation. "Finally, the number of chunks retained in short-term memory after brief exposure to chess positions is about the magnitude we would predict from immediate recall of common words ... and copying of visual patterns."

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