Guillermo Campitelli

The role of domain-specific practice, handedness, and starting age in chess.

The respective roles of the environment and innate talent have been a recurrent question for research into expertise. The authors investigated markers of talent, environment, and critical period for the acquisition of expert performance in chess. Argentinian chess players (N = 104), ranging from weak amateurs to grandmasters, completed a questionnaire measuring variables including individual and group practice, starting age, and handedness. The study reaffirms the importance of practice for reaching high levels of performance, but it also indicates a large variability: The slower player needed 8 times as much practice to reach master level than the faster player. Additional results show a correlation between skill and starting age and indicate that players are more likely to be mixed-handed than individuals in the general population; however, there was no correlation between handedness and skill within the sample of chess players. Together, these results suggest that practice is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the acquisition of expertise, that some additional factors may differentiate chessplayers and nonchessplayers, and that starting age of practice is important.

Brain localization of memory chunks in chessplayers.

Chess experts store domain-specific representations in their long-term memory; due to the activation of such representations, they perform with high accuracy in tasks that require the maintenance of previously seen information. Chunk-based theories of expertise (chunking theory: ; template theory: ) state that expertise is acquired mainly by the acquisition and storage in long-term memory of familiar chunks that allow quick recognition. This study tested some predictions of these theories by using fMRI while chessplayers performed a recognition memory task. These theories predict that chessplayers access long-term memory chunks of domain-specific information, which are presumably stored in the temporal lobes. It was also predicted that the recognition memory tasks would activate working memory areas in the frontal and parietal lobes. These predictions were supported by the data.

Herbert Simon's decision-making approach: Investigation of cognitive processes in experts

Herbert Simons research endeavor aimed to understand the processes that participate in human decision making. However, despite his effort to investigate this question, his work did not have the impact in the “decision making” community that it had in other fields. His rejection of the assumption of perfect rationality, made in mainstream economics, led him to develop the concept of bounded rationality. Simons approach also emphasized the limitations of the cognitive system, the change of processes due to expertise, and the direct empirical study of cognitive processes involved in decision making. In this article, we argue that his subsequent research program in problem solving and expertise offered critical tools for studying decision-making processes that took into account his original notion of bounded rationality. Unfortunately, these tools were ignored by the main research paradigms in decision making, such as Tversky and Kahnemans biased rationality approach (also known as the heuristics and biases approach) and the ecological approach advanced by Gigerenzer and others. We make a proposal of how to integrate Simons approach with the main current approaches to decision making. We argue that this would lead to better models of decision making that are more generalizable, have higher ecological validity, include specification of cognitive processes, and provide a better understanding of the interaction between the characteristics of the cognitive system and the contingencies of the environment.

Rise of human intelligence: Comments on Howard (1999)

Based upon the evidence that the best chess players in the world are becoming increasingly represented by relatively young individuals, Howard [Intelligence 27 (1999) 235–250.] claimed that human intelligence is rising over generations. We suggest that this explanation has several difficulties and show that alternative explanations relating to changes in the chess environment, including increased access to chess knowledge, offer better explanations for the increased presence of young players at top-level chess. D 2002 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.

The mind's eye in blindfold chess

Visual imagery plays an important role in problem solving, and research into blindfold chess has provided a wealth of empirical data on this question. We show how a recent theory of expert memory (the template theory; Gobet & Simon, 1996b, 2000) accounts for most of these data. However, how the minds eye filters out relevant from irrelevant information is still underspecified in the theory. We describe two experiments addressing this question, in which chess games are presented visually, move by move, on a board that contains irrelevant information (static positions, semistatic positions, and positions changing every move). The results show that irrelevant information affects chess masters only when it changes during the presentation of the target game. This suggests that novelty information is used by the minds eye to select incoming visual information and separate “figure” and “ground”. Mechanisms already present in the template theory can be used to account for this novelty effect.

Left lateralization in autobiographical memory: An fMRI study using the expert archival paradigm

In brain-imaging and behavioral research, studies of autobiographical memory have higher ecological validity than controlled laboratory memory studies. However, they also have less controllability over the variables investigated. This article presents a novel technique—the expert archival paradigm—that increases controllability while maintaining ecological validity. Stimuli were created from games played by two international-level chess masters. The two players were asked to perform a memory task with stimuli generated from their own games and stimuli generated from other players’ games while they were scanned using fMRI. The study found a left lateralized pattern of brain activity that was very similar in both masters. The brain areas activated were the left temporo-parietal junction and left frontal areas. The expert archival paradigm has the advantage of not requiring an interview to assess the participants’ autobiographical memories, and affords the possibility of measuring their accuracy of remembering as well as their brain activity related to remote and recent memories. It can also be used in any field of expertise, including arts, sciences, and sports, in which archival data are available.