Küchelmann Thomas, Velentzas Konstantinos, Essig Kai, Schack Thomas
Department of Neurocognition and Action-Biomechanics, Faculty of Sport Sciences, Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany.
Center of Cognitive Interaction Technology, Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany.
Front Psychol. 2024 Oct 24;15:1294424. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1294424. eCollection 2024.
Visuocognitive performance is closely related to expertise in chess and has been scrutinized by several investigations in the last decades. The results indicate that experts' decision-making benefits from the chunking process, perception and visual strategies. Despite numerous studies which link these concepts, most of these investigations have employed common research designs that do not use real chess play, but create artificial laboratory conditions via screen-based chess stimuli and obtrusive stationary eye tracking with or without capturing of decision-making or virtual reality settings.
The present study assessed the visuocognitive performance of chess novices, intermediates and experts in a real chess setting. Instead of check detection, find-the-best-move tasks or to distinguish between regions of a chessboard that were relevant or irrelevant to the best move in previous studies, we introduced n-mate tasks and sequentially manipulated their difficulty. Due to the complexity of the tasks, we monitored players' visual strategies in a fine-graded initial phase (different time intervals instead of analysing a fixed number of first fixations) of task-solving and for complete trials, employing non-obtrusive mobile eye tracking, multi-sensor observation and full-automatic annotation of decision-making.
The results revealed significant expertise-dependent differences in visuocognitive performance based on a circumstantial spatial and temporal analysis. In order to provide more detailed results, for the first time the analyses were performed under the special consideration of different time intervals and spatial scalings. In summary, experts showed a significantly higher number of fixations on areas of interest and empty squares between pieces in the task processing than less-skilled players. However, they had a strikingly low total number of fixations on the whole board and in complete trials.
As a conclusion, experts apply different visual search strategies in problem-solving. Moreover, experts' visuocognitive processing benefits from stored chunks of mating constellations.
视觉认知表现与国际象棋专业技能密切相关，在过去几十年中受到了多项研究的审视。结果表明，专家的决策得益于组块过程、感知和视觉策略。尽管有大量研究将这些概念联系起来，但大多数此类研究采用的是常见的研究设计，不使用真实的国际象棋对弈，而是通过基于屏幕的国际象棋刺激以及有或没有决策捕捉或虚拟现实设置的侵入性固定眼动追踪来创造人工实验室条件。
本研究在真实的国际象棋环境中评估了国际象棋新手、中级棋手和专家的视觉认知表现。与之前研究中的检查检测、找到最佳走法任务或区分棋盘上与最佳走法相关或不相关的区域不同，我们引入了将死任务并依次操纵其难度。由于任务的复杂性，我们在任务解决的精细分级初始阶段（不同的时间间隔，而不是分析固定数量的首次注视）以及完整试验中，采用非侵入性移动眼动追踪、多传感器观察和决策的全自动注释来监测棋手的视觉策略。
基于情境空间和时间分析，结果揭示了视觉认知表现中显著的专业技能依赖性差异。为了提供更详细的结果，首次在特别考虑不同时间间隔和空间尺度的情况下进行了分析。总之，在任务处理过程中，专家在感兴趣区域和棋子之间的空格上的注视次数明显多于技能较低的棋手。然而，他们在整个棋盘上以及完整试验中的总注视次数却非常低。
总之，专家在解决问题时应用不同的视觉搜索策略。此外，专家的视觉认知处理得益于存储的将死局面组块。
