Chess players' intake of task-relevant cues

Patterns of chess pieces are important for chess players in storing information in memory-recall tasks. It also may be assumed that these patterns play a central role in the perceptual coding of task-relevant cues. Two perceptual classification experiments were done to test this assumption. Chess-players' intake of task-relevant cues was studied by measuring the reaction times of subjects in counting the minor pieces on the chessboard or searching for checks in the game and in random positions. Surprisingly, there was no interaction between the level of skill and the type of position. In Experiment 3, both a perceptual classification task and a memory-recall task using the same positions were presented to a group of chess players at the same session. In the perceptual classification task, there was no interaction between the level of skill and the type of position, but in the recall task there was strong interaction. The result suggests that the information intake of chess players, in its lowest levels, is not dependent on the learned patterns. The role of the patterns becomes important in defining the information to be looked for, but the patterns are not important in the early-stage perceptual structuring of a position.     

Why leave the teaching profession? A longitudinal approach to the prevalence and persistence of teacher turnover intentions

Social Psychology of Education - Teacher turnover has been recognized as a significant problem in the education worldwide. This study focuses on exploring reasons behind the turnover intentions,...     

Parenting, achievement strategies and satisfaction in ice hockey

The aim of this study is to understand adolescent players' satisfaction as a function of parenting styles, players' achievement strategies, and their norm breaking behavior. Finnish 14- and 16-year-old ice-hockey players (n=1018) completed a questionnaire measuring their achievement strategies (SAQ; Nurmi, Salmela--Aro & Haavisto, 1995 b), as well as scales of norm breaking and satisfaction, prepared for the present study. The parents (n=979) filled in scales measuring their parenting styles (CRPR; Pulkkinen, 1996) and attitudes towards norm breaking. Results revealed that players from authoritative families who showed a high level of mastery-orientation expressed high satisfaction in playing ice hockey. Results also showed negative associations between authoritative parenting and both task irrelevant and norm breaking behavior. Parents with parental stress and those with authoritarian parenting styles showed positive attitudes to norm breaking behavior, and players from authoritarian and parental stress homes showed norm breaking behavior in ice hockey. There was no association between norm breaking behavior and player satisfaction. Our results contribute to the planning of a coaching system that serves more educational and developmental purposes, and that encourages the desire to play ice hockey as a hobby.     

What do computer models of cognition explain: a reply to Gobet

The differences between Gobet’s views and ours call attention to some points concerning the argumentative status of computational models. If we have two fundamentally different models which reasonably accurately simulate a phenomenon, we must ask, what is the argumentative status of the models in psychological terms. Moreover, if it is possible to present different models of same phenomena, what is the general argumentative power of models in psychology? As the kind of differences between our views and the ones of Gobet’s are common in modelling, we briefly call attention to these foundational issues in our paper.     

Continuity of temperament from infancy to middle childhood

Continuity of temperament from 6 months (the IBQ) to 5.5 years (the CBQ) was explored in Finnish children (n = 231) within the theoretical framework deviced by Rothbart. Activity level, smiling and laughter, distress to limitations and fear showed significant differential homotypic and heterotypic continuity, while soothability and duration of orienting showed significant differential heterotypic continuity. On the level of latent superconstructs, infant positive and negative affectivity accounted for 4.6, 22.3, and 6.0% of the variance in childhood extraversion, effortful control and negative affectivity, respectively. Infant and childhood temperament clustered into profile types named “resilient”, “undercontrolled”, and “overcontrolled” mirroring ipsative continuity. These findings give empirical credence to Rothbart's theory by replicating and extending previous findings in significant ways.     

Continuity of father-rated temperament from infancy to middle childhood

Continuity of father-rated temperament in Finnish children (n = 115) aged from 6 months (the IBQ) to 5.5 years (the CBQ) was explored within the theoretical framework developed by Rothbart. Father-rated activity level, smiling and laughter and distress to limitations showed significant differential homotypic and heterotypic continuity, while soothability, duration of orienting and fear showed significant differential heterotypic continuity. On the level of latent superconstructs, father-rated positive and negative infant affectivity accounted for 5.1, 22.7 and 10.0% of the variance in childhood extraversion, effortful control and negative affectivity, respectively. Inter-parental comparisons (n = 109 family units) revealed that father-rated continuity was similar to mother-rated continuity. These findings give empirical credence to Rothbart's theory and to father-rated temperamental continuity from infancy onwards.     

Error in chess: The apperception-restructuring view

Summary Five protocol-analysis experiments with tactical, endgame, and strategic positions were conducted to study cognitive errors in chess players' thinking. It will be argued that chess players' errors can be only partially explained in terms of unspecified working-memory overload, because the working-memory loads caused by the solution paths are usually small. It is therefore necessary to consider apperceptive mechanisms also, as these control information intake.Subjects fail either because they are not able to see the right prototypical problem space at all, or because they fail to close them as a result of missing some crucial task-relevant cue. This makes chess players lose their belief in the idea and restructure, after which the apperceptive information-selection mechanisms make the fording of the solution still more unlikely.     

Visuospatial and articulatory interference in chess players' information intake

Modularity of the human information processing system has been widely accepted. Research based on this theoretical construction has been successful in many areas of cognitive psychology. Surprisingly little work has, however, been done towards understanding the consequences of modularity in thinking skills. In this paper the functions of visuospatial and articulatory processing will be compared in the context of chess skill to obtain information concerning the cognitive resources needed in this skill. Two experiments on chess players' information intake will be made, in which the effects of visuospatial and an articulatory secondary tasks will be compared. In both experiments a visuospatial secondary task causes strong interference, while an articulatory task has no effect on processing. So chess is a highly visual task but articulation, contrary to some pre-theoretical beliefs, has no real significance.     

Chess players' recall of auditorily presented chess positions

Abstract

Chess players' recall of auditorily presented chess positions were studied in three experiments. The results of the first two experiments showed that the skilled chess players are better at recalling game and random positions. This contradicts the standard finding that they perform better only in game positions. In the third experiment, the memory load was increased by increasing the number of positions to be recalled simultaneously from one to four positions. Skilled subjects are still far better at recalling game positions, but they score no more than moderately skilled subjects in recalling four random positions.

The results are in contradiction with the direct chunking hypothesis. Skilled chess players do not fail to recall random positions because there are no chunks in them, but because they are not, under some special conditions, able to encode them properly. It is necessary to postulate more complicated encoding mechanisms than a simple recognition-based activation of a chunk in long-term memory.     

Mental contents in transfer

The purpose of this paper is to develop theoretical concepts for mental content-based investigations and explanations in the psychology of human thinking in general and transfer more specifically. The schema-based analysis of transfer postulates that the solving of an earlier problem can influence a person's future behavior only to the degree of schematic similarity between the primary and the secondary problem solution. The reported content-based investigation, using Duncker's (1935) classic tumor task, shows however, that the contents of schemata cause an essential variation in a person's mental representation and judgement of radiation confluence effects. The study identified and assessed in separate experiments the influence of three different thought models (additive, balancing, and distribution-based) and two distinct types of spatial images of rays (compact vs. diverging). Whereas differences in the central tendencies of the judgements could expose some of the priming effects between experimental conditions, the core of the content-based analysis was based on the identification of distinct groups of participants displaying a certain type of judgement. These differences reflected the contrasts between the thought models and the ray image content. They substantiated the claim that a schema-based analysis of transfer and reasoning in general, is alone not sufficient to explain interindividual and intercontextual differences that are based on distinctive mental content in the reasoners' apperception.