Visuospatial representations used by chess experts: A preliminary study

Blindfold chess is played without the players seeing either the pieces or the board. It is a skill‐related activity, and only very skilled players can construct the mental images required. This is why blindfold chess provides a good task with which to investigate the spatial memory and skilled mental images of expert players. In a PET investigation, we compared memory performance and problem solving in very experienced chess players with their performance in an attention task, in which the subjects classified the names of chess pieces. The memory task predominantly activated the temporal areas, whereas problem solving activated several frontal areas. The relevance of these findings to concepts such as general imagery, skilled imagery, apperception, and long‐term working memory are discussed.