More recently, Gobet and Chassy run computer simulations based on the idea of chunks and templates (see the next chapter), showing that experts’ perception, even though it might look holistic, can be accounted for by the incremental construction of an internal representation using patterns that are initially fairly small. perception of relations of defence and attack between pieces) were sufficient for explaining the data.
In the 1960s, there was an interesting debate about this issue between Soviet psychologist Oleg Tikhomirov and Herbert Simon, with Tikhomirov defending the view that perception is holistic, while Simon argued that local mechanisms (e.g. In chess, perceptually salient features correlate very often with the strategic and tactical meanings of a position.Ī classic debate in psychology concerns the nature of perception: is it holistic, with objects perceived in their totality, as maintained by Gestalt psychologists, or is it constructed by incremental mechanisms, as argued by reductionists? Although not a Gestalt psychologist himself, de Groot proposed that strong players start with a “landscape view” of the board, which provides a global impression of the position, with the details omitted. Finally, it is likely that fairly simple visual cues – such as a White pawn that has penetrated Black’s defence – direct masters’ eye movements to significant squares. This buttresses the hypothesis that masters perceive groups of pieces rather than individual pieces. Another interesting result was that masters fixated more often on the intersection of squares than the weak players. Masters’ fixations also covered more squares and landed more often on the squares that were important from a chess point of view. There were clear differences between weak players and masters, with the latter having shorter and less variable fixations. The data were fully analysed even later, in a book de Groot wrote with Jongman and myself (see Further Reading). The task was again to reproduce a chess position presented briefly, this time uniformly for 5 seconds.
This technology was not available before the war when de Groot collected the data of his PhD research, and it is only in the 1960s that he was able to carry out such an experiment, with his PhD student Riekent Jongman. A natural way to study skill differences in perception is to record eye movements.
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