No, I am not referring to throwing your chess pieces across the room when you get frustrated. Chunking refers to our ability to retain more information in our short term memory than originally thought. When George Miller wrote his seminal paper, “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on our Capacity for Processing Information” he showed our short term memory can expand past 5-7 items by utilizing a process called “chunking”. Chunking is defined as, “a collection of elements that are strongly associated with one another but are weakly associated with elements in other chunks.” (Goldstein, 2011) It is how we group items into categories according to how they relate to each other semantically or perceptually. I believe the most important aspect of chunking is that it has to have meaning to the person who is trying to recall the information.
For a chess player, one of the most essential aspects of playing successfully is the ability to recognize patterns of piece arrangement on the board. This recognition happens only after thousands of hours of studying and playing at the chess board. This identification of configurations, or to put it in cognitive psychology terms, chunking, is an integral aspect of chess tactics. The ability to recognize a tactic, whether it is a pin or a skewer, is the main component which separates a chess master from a chess patzer. Most of us can push the pieces across the board in some meaningful way, but do we have the ability to recognize a smothered mate when it presents itself? I have found, most people do not, as they do not have the time it takes to devout to chess.
Adrian de Groot was the first to hypothesis about the ability of chess masters recognition of patterns of chess piece placement on the board. The masters were able to recognize the patterns, if they were ones they were familiar, after only a few seconds. If the chess masters were unfamiliar with the patterns, then their ability to retain the pattern in their memories were equivalent to a regular player.
Recently for my English class I wrote an ethnography which was based on chess players my local chess club. I was able to see firsthand how some of the grandmasters and international masters were able to pick out patterns which were familiar to them in order to defeat their opponent. Some patterns I recognized, though most I did not. It became clear to me quickly, who put in more time at the chess board than whom. The use of chunking in chess is an easy concept to understand, as the more you play the more patterns you recognize, and the more you recognize, the more significant the patterns become.
References:
Goldstein, B. (2011). Cognitive psychology: Connecting mind, research, and everyday experience. (3rd ed.). Belmont: Wadsworth.
http://snitkof.com/cg156/chesschunkingtheory.php
https://chessprogramming.wikispaces.com/Chunking
Chunking happens to take place so naturally, that we sometimes take it for granted. It is a very resourceful mnemonic technique for the memorization of important facts. When we organize information into meaningful units, such as letters, words, and phrases, we recall it more easily. We all remember information best when we can organize it into personally meaningful arrangements. When people develop expertise in an area, they process information not only in chunks but also in hierarchies composed of a few broad concepts divided and subdivided into narrower concepts and facts. By organizing knowledge in hierarchies, we retrieve information efficiently.
As an intermediate chess player, I have never used chunking in reference of chess moves or or strategies of defeat. However, with chunking, you can increase your recall of digits, too. An impossible string of 16 numbers of a credit card number or —1-4-9-2-1-7-7-6-1-8-1-2-1-9-4-1—becomes easy for an American when chunked into 1492, 1776, 1812, 1941. These are important years in U.S. History, in reference: Christopher Columbus, the Revolutionary War, The War of 1812, and World War II. However, I have used this mnemonic process in order to memorize phone numbers and social security numbers. In my field of work as a social worker, chunking comes in handy, especially when you don’t have a pen and paper to write things down.
Goldstein, B. (2011). Cognitive psychology: Connecting mind, research, and everyday experience. (3rd ed.). Belmont: Wadsworth.
Class notes from Introduction to Psychology
I feel you made a very interesting and valid point regarding chunking. We definitely use chunking as a way to increase memory capacity on many levels. For example, I became aware I was chunking information during the phonological similarity CogLab. Initially I was not consciously aware I was doing this; however, after a few trials, I realized I had developed a system to recognize patterns more efficiently. Following Millers publication of the “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two,” many other researchers argued that his participants in the study were chunking the information (Goldstein, 2011). I feel from my experience in participating in the phonological similarity experiment, this may be very true. The idea of chunking patterns is interesting. This appears, to me, to have associations to semantic networks or spreading activation. I hypothesis that chess or chess tactics are stored in nodes. Based on past experiences these nodes such as chess pieces are linked to more general nodes at the top while specific chess pieces and their movements link the concepts. A player may see a castle in a certain position and activation will spread, connecting it with more nodes that represent even more specific subordinates. Of course, like the study involving bird experts and like you pointed out, a chess master will not only recognize the type of tactic being used, but, will also know the exact reason the person is trying to use that tactic. This implies that category levels may also be utilized during pattern recognition. The level of categories will depend on the amount of expertise an individual has on the subject (lecture notes, 2014).
Goldstein, B. (2011). Cognitive psychology: Connecting mind, research, and everyday experience. (3rd ed.). Belmont: Wadsworth.
(2014). Lesson 10: Knowledge. Lecture notes from PSYCH 253.