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Science of Chess - Eyetracking, board vision, and expertise (Part 2 of 2)

Thank you so much for your very interesting blog posts! It is great how you make research relevant for chess discussion.

Btw, I couldn't find the difference in the latter picture, so the spoiler is welcome :D
@anpasa said in #2:
> Thank you so much for your very interesting blog posts! It is great how you make research relevant for chess discussion.
>
> Btw, I couldn't find the difference in the latter picture, so the spoiler is welcome :D

Thank you for reading - glad you enjoyed it! Also glad you found the difference. :)
excellent program this series. Thank you for walking us along these series of experiments.

I appreciate that, at least now, we have 3 groups. it is not a binary contrast anymore... one can start looking at some hypotheses of evolution.

I also like the increased control on the board information, and reducing the measure problem to a static perception problem.

mate or check being, after all, very close to the rule set verbatim... Definition of mate patterns for example static mates (any test about deciding is a position is a mate, byw?) are rather fully rational or logical to define, or even generalize. and contrast with each other. notion of generalization might be approachable. maybe..

I still have to read this and the previous blog again more carefully. But I find it great already on my first fly by.
Great article, thanks for writing this up! The section on peripheral vision was new to me, and is an important detail about eye tracking that I glossed over before in trying to understand eye tracking results.

About why expert players look more at empty squares, isn't another possibility that the expert players were calculating ahead more? For instance, if they see a promising queen move, they might spend time looking at the square their queen would move to, and consider the possibilities from there. Less skilled players would think ahead less, so would thus be spending more of their time on the pieces as they currently are.

This goes along with the idea that stronger players often discuss key squares, while weaker players rarely think of squares in and of themselves. (You could say weak players only see the pieces, while stronger players also see the board itself.)
@Graque said in #7:
> Great article, thanks for writing this up! The section on peripheral vision was new to me, and is an important detail about eye tracking that I glossed over before in trying to understand eye tracking results.
>
> About why expert players look more at empty squares, isn't another possibility that the expert players were calculating ahead more? For instance, if they see a promising queen move, they might spend time looking at the square their queen would move to, and consider the possibilities from there. Less skilled players would think ahead less, so would thus be spending more of their time on the pieces as they currently are.
>
> This goes along with the idea that stronger players often discuss key squares, while weaker players rarely think of squares in and of themselves. (You could say weak players only see the pieces, while stronger players also see the board itself.)

Thanks for reading! That's a neat idea - you could imagine coding important empty squares in the target positions and see if stronger players do look at those spots more. I don't think these folks built that into their design, but I'll take a look to see if some more recent stuff in the literature did. If it hasn't been done, somebody should check it out. :)