Anyone who knows me knows that I’m a huge cognitive sciences guy who loves to learn about ‘human motivation’ and ’cause and effect’.  That said, I recently read a UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO study from the Department of Psychology which is very interesting and which does impact our understanding of how different people interpret/perceive situational causality and it was done through the measurement of eye movement between different levels of ‘Chess Players’.

To put it simply – Chess Masters did not focus their attention on individual pieces but rather they focused on ‘chunks in random structures’ or the pattern of pieces and their relationships.  This proved two predictions, “chess experts would demonstrate larger visual spans and better change detection than less skilled players” and “the shift point of a gaze and the amount of time of that gaze showed far greater focus on the pattern between pieces rather than on individual pieces”.

This is very important to understand because those who are trained to use their thought to play out scenarios in playing chess can apply those same skills to their lives and therefore play-out within their mind recognizable configurations of outcomes and commit this to long-term memory structures that assist with faster problem-solving context that further allow them to trigger a generation of plausible outcomes based on the decisions they make.  In essence, their mind’s ‘search engine’ become faster in making decisions because they can more easily recall future possible best outcomes.

In the study, it was recognized by Chase and Simon (1973a, 1973b), who “hypothesized that much of the skilled chess player’s advantage lies in the early perceptual organization and internal representation of the chess position. Specifically, they argued that the link between skilled perception and skilled problem solving was to be found in the associations between perceptual chunks and plausible move generation. The size of an expert’s vocabulary of chess- related configurations was initially estimated to be 50,000 to 100,000 chunks (Simon & Gilmartin, 1973), although small perceptual chunks are most likely supplemented by larger structures termed templates (Gobet & Simon, 1996b).”

This study on visual span in expert chess players shows evidence through eye movement that indeed it is not the individual pieces but the sum of the parts and their relationships where our focus and attention show be in order to make more informed and faster decisioning.  But more importantly, that there is a critical importance in developing these knowledge structures early in our personal development to understand how situations affect relationships and vice versa.