Apperception in chess players' long-range planning

Abstract

Chess players' long-range planning or chess-strategic thinking is based on more or less poorly definable and intuitive notions such as weak-square, initiative, space advantage, etc. Since these concepts are fuzzy and thus close to everyday concepts, chess players' long-range planning provides a good environment to study apperception with poorly definable notions. The three experiments provided data indicating that problem subspace abstraction has both benefits and costs. Active representation blockades alternative representations unless subjects restructure. As a result, chess players often make serious cognitive errors by abstracting the wrong problem subspaces. Even in strategical positions, the problem subspaces generated are self-consistent and bound by unconscious content-specific principles.