Perception in Chess.

Chase, W. G., & Simon, H. A. (1973). Perception in Chess. Cognitive Psychology, 4(1), 55-81.

Type

Journal article

Intellectual base

Primary research

Year

1973

DOI

10.1016/0010-0285(73)90004-2

Link

https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0285(73)90004-2

Cited from

architecture_urban_planning, psychology

Cited by

4 citations across 4 artifacts.

Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.

Primes

• Chunking
  • Cognitive psychology (formal/abstract).

    This sourceCanonical experiment: chess masters chunk meaningful board positions into ~5–7 units while novices process individual pieces, with no master advantage on random arrangements.

• Design Patterns

  • This sourceDemonstrates that chess masters chunk meaningful board positions into ~5–7 familiar units (with no advantage on random positions), proving domain-specific pattern recognition.

• Exemplar Retrieval
  • And in expert craft, masters store vast libraries of positions, samples, or images and retrieve the most similar one — chess, wine tasting, fingerprint matching, radiology — rather than reasoning from rules.

    This sourceDemonstrates expert performance rests on a large stored repertoire of remembered patterns retrieved by similarity, the exemplar account of expertise.

Domain-specific

• Curse Of Knowledge
  • The mechanism is theory-of-mind asymmetry compounded by the chunking and automaticity of expertise: once a skill is chunked into automatic processing, its component sub-skills become invisible to introspection, and their absence in a novice becomes correspondingly hard to imagine.

    This sourceEstablishes chunking in expertise: skilled performers compile patterns into automatic units, rendering component sub-skills invisible to introspection.

Verification

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