Intuition in chess: a study with world-class players

Intuition plays a central role in cognition in general and expertise in particular. Dreyfus and Dreyfus’s (1986) and Gobet and Chassy’s (2008) theories of expert intuition propose that a characteristic feature of expert intuition is the holistic understanding displayed by experts. The ideal way to test this prediction is to use highly expert participants and short presentation times. Chess players (N = 63), ranging from candidate masters to world-class players, had to evaluate chess problems. Evaluating the problems required an understanding of the position as a whole. Results demonstrated an effect of skill (better players had better evaluations), complexity (simpler positions were better evaluated than complex positions) and balance (accuracy diminished when the true evaluations became more extreme). A regression analysis showed that skill accounted for 44% of the variance in evaluation error. These important results support the central role of holistic intuition in expertise.