Location Coding in Chess

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Abstract
Whether the chunks used in memorizing chess positions are general and relatively encoded schemata or very precisely coded instances is a problem that has raised some controversy within the psychology of chess skill. As chess research has had a strong impact on expertise research, this problem is important in many areas of skills research other than chess. To resolve it, four experiments were set up. In the experiments it was shown that subjects were better at recalling correctly located non-transposed chunks than transposed chunks, which were similar in structure but incorrectly located on the chessboard. The results imply that the representation of chess-specific patterns in the memory of a chess player contains not only information about the forms of chess-specific patterns, but also about their absolute locations on the chessboard. This provides an explanation for the well-known interaction between skill and type of position and its disappearance in recent experiments by Lories and Saariluoma. It can be argued that the difficulty of recalling random positions is not chiefly caused by the total absence of chunks but by their dislocation.

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