Visual span in expert chess players: Evidence from eye movements

The reported research extends classic findings that after briefly viewing structured, but not random, chess positions, chess masters reproduce these positions much more accurately than less-skilled players. Using a combination of the gaze-contingent window papadigm and the change blindness flicker paradigm, we documented dramatically larger visual spans for experts while processing structure, hut not random, chess positions. In addition, in a check-detection task a minimized 3 x 3 chessboard containing a Ring and potentially checking pieces,vas displayed. In this task, experts mane fewer fixations per trial than less-skilled players, and had a greater proportion of fixations between individual pieces, rather than on pieces. Our results provide strong evidence for a perceptual encoding advantage for experts attributable to chess experience, rather than to a general perceptual or memory superiority.