Chess experts are known for their remarkable ability to recall configurations of chess pieces on a board. For decades, neurological experts have investigated how this memory functions and whether it can be applied to information beyond the gameboard.
To further probe this topic, researchers from The University of Texas at Dallas’ Center for Vital Longevity (CVL) turned to the UT Dallas chess team. Since the chess program’s inception in 1996, 24 Grandmasters and International Masters have played for the UT Dallas team, which has competed in the President’s Cup — known as the “Final Four of College Chess” — in 17 of the last 21 seasons.
The researchers tested 14 chess team members, along with 15 chess novices, on rapid-fire processing of visuospatial information in working memory.
Their findings, published June 14 in Memory and Cognition, help pinpoint the strengths and limitations of the subjects’ recall framework and how that framework can be applied to human cognition in general.
“Prior studies have shown that chess experts’ advantage in visual memory is limited to chess pieces on chess boards,” said corresponding author Dr. Chandramallika Basak, associate professor of psychology in the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences. “We wanted to see whether the expertise generalizes beyond chess pieces to unfamiliar, new stimuli, and where does this expertise break down for immediate memory.”
Chess masters’ visual short-term memory for arrangements that can occur in chess has been of particular interest to cognitive scientists, said Basak, director of the Lifespan Neuroscience and Cognition Laboratory.
“It’s almost like chess experts have snapshots of these positions — they demonstrate remarkable visuospatial working memory, given that the information is presented for less than half a second,” she said. “But is it driven by the visual aspects or spatial aspects of what they saw? Or a combination of both?”
Evan T. Smith, a UT Dallas cognition and neuroscience doctoral student, is the paper’s lead author. He described the difference between working and long-term memory as analogous to the gap between what’s on top of your desk and what’s filed away in a cabinet.
“The existing theory is that chess players have so thoroughly memorized and categorized board configurations that their long-term memory for this information functions like working memory,” he said.
The researchers collaborated with Jim Stallings, director of the UT Dallas chess program, to bring test subjects on board from the team.
“Dr. Basak’s study varies from other chess studies done with youngsters,” Stallings said. “This study goes directly to chess expertise and working memory. I look forward to sharing the results with the chess community.”
The control group included UT Dallas students — of similar age and education level to the chess players — who had never formally learned how to play chess.
In each test, participants saw a two-dimensional chessboard with a number of pieces displayed for three-tenths of a second. After a one-second pause, they saw a second chessboard and had to decide if there had been a change.
The tests were conducted with standard chess pieces and with novel, unfamiliar symbols. Basak said that this switch helped to determine if the chess players’ memory abilities were domain specific to chess or domain general to a wider range of objects.
“One series of tests asks about changes in location; the second asks if the objects — the pieces themselves — have changed,” Basak said. “A third test incorporates changes in location or changes in object, or both, or no change at all. Finally, the grid of the board is removed.”
The researchers found that while both chess experts and novices performed better with chess stimuli than with the unfamiliar symbols, the experts, for the most part, outperformed the control group for both chess stimuli and for the new objects — particularly when detecting positional changes.
When changing the identity of the objects, however, but not location, the chess players’ advantage was limited to the chess pieces. They performed no better than the control group at remembering when the identity of the novel symbols changed.
“You would expect that this advantage that chess players have is related to a familiarity with the chess pieces or the chess players’ expectation of what they are about to see,” Basak said. “But results from our study say otherwise. It seems like the chess players can rapidly process a chessboard-like layout in a very holistic manner, like the brain does with faces. The next step in our research may be to do a functional MRI study to see if the face-processing regions of the brain are also used for chess.”
The experiments also were split into tests using fewer than four pieces — which is within the normal limits of an average person’s focus of attention — and five to eight pieces. With the larger number of pieces, long-term memory should come into play. The chess experts performed better than the controls in the tests with more pieces.
“We observed an eight-item working-memory capacity for chess experts,” Basak said. “We assume that ties back to the idea that chess players are viewing the board and the set of positions as a single object, as they would recognize a face.”
The “grid-versus-no-grid” portion of the study — something that Basak said has not been examined before — produced some of the more striking results.
“The grid is the linchpin that supports the scaffolding of this memory structure,” Smith said.
Basak added: “Any expertise-related advantage disappeared in the absence of the chessboard display. It appears to be essential, acting as a road map, a familiar framework to aid the memory.”
Collectively, the results indicate that visuospatial memory advantages associated with chess expertise extend beyond chess stimuli in certain circumstances, particularly to position changes with between five to eight items. But the grid appears to be necessary for experts to leverage these advantages.
“We cannot generalize our findings beyond what we tested, so we cannot claim, based on our data, that chess experts will be better at studying for school,” Basak said. “But their advantage does go beyond chess pieces, provided the grid remains. We believe this indicates that experts are automatically encoding spatial-relational information.”
Other contributors to the research were Dr. Daniel Krawczyk, UT Dallas professor of psychology, holder of the Debbie and Jim Francis Chair in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, deputy director of the Center for BrainHealth and associate professor of psychiatry at UT Southwestern Medical Center; and Dr. James Bartlett, a distinguished scholar in cognitive neuroscience and cognitive psychology and a longtime UT Dallas faculty member who played a key role in the beginning of the project. Bartlett died in 2019.
“Jim Bartlett played a big role in designing the experiments and in bringing Jim Stallings and the chess team on board,” Basak said. “He was a mentor, friend and valued collaborator, and we dedicate this publication in honor of his memory.”