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Has anyone compared how people with and without aphantasia play chess? When most people who play chess need to look a few ply ahead they do so by visualizing t

by tzs 2y ago

Has anyone compared how people with and without aphantasia play chess? When most people who play chess need to look a few ply ahead they do so by visualizing the board and pieces and them moving those visualized pieces around on that visualized board. They pretty much do with the visualized board what they would do if they had access to a physical or computer analysis board that they could actually move pieces around on. I once wondered if top players do it that way too, or if maybe the see the position in some more abstract way like a graph with pieces as vertices and colored directed edges encoding relationships such as "The rook is attacking that night" and "that knight is defended by that bishop" and moves are then operations that shift edges. I asked GM Nakamura about it on an AMA he did on Reddit, and he said he sees the board just like nearly everybody else does.

abetusk 2y ago
For what it's worth, there's a study (N=123) on recall for people with aphantansia [0]. One of the tests was to take a look at a picture, of a living room with furniture in it, say, and then have the subject try to redraw the room in as much detail as they can. People with aphantansia have better spatial accuracy and fewer memory errors. The basic hypothesis is, I guess, that people with aphantansia develop scaffolding to help them memorize so they're better at some of the details that other folks that rely too heavily on their mental imagery. I don't know of any studies on chess in particular (though I haven't looked) but I would imagine that something similar could be at play here, where it might not be obvious that people with aphantasia are worse for these types of games. [0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7856239/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7856239/
johnfn 2y ago
I have aphantasia and I play chess (albeit not very well...) Honestly, I think that aphantasia is a bit overhyped; I can do virtually all the things that people with normal mental imagery can do, except I suppose actually visualize the thing in my mind. The way that it works feels akin to a blind man groping in a dark room. If I try to visualize a chess board, of course I only "see" blackness (or nothing), but if you ask me what square is at e2, I can kind of mentally "feel" in that area and know that there's a king pawn there. And I can kind of "feel" below it that there's a king, and a queen, etc. Normal people see things in their visual imagery by directing their attention at a spot in their mind, seeing it, and then registering what they saw. I just skip the middle step.
- OvbiousError 2y ago
  Interesting. As an aphant I can perhaps do what you describe, what I can absolutely not do is e.g. calculate moves with my eyes closed. I can calculate a couple of moves in, but then it gets hard, and I'm not sure if this is something solveable with practice or just a hard stop. Similarly, the top chess players can remember a lot of the matches they played, and others they studied. This is not something my brain is able to do, period. Similar to how I have less personal memories than a lot of other people.
- KK7NIL 2y ago
  I'm about 1800-2000 on lichess and have almost complete aphantasia and I do feel like it really hurts me, especially in very sharp middlegame positions. When calculating I have to explicitly list out what squares are attacked by what pieces, which is inevitably very slow. Long term positional planning isn't a problem as I can feel my way around a position pretty well and can imagine positions I want to reach, but detail heavy calculation is much harder. Doing a lot of deep puzzles is the best antidote I've found.(And blind chess, but that's really hard)
v64 2y ago
Studies have shown that GMs have better mental recall of actual board positions, but if you set the pieces randomly on the board in ways that may be illegal or nonsensical, their recall falls to average. It may be that they're not directly interacting with the visualization, but some mixture of it combined with their knowledge of the position to reconstruct the details.
dfan 2y ago
IM David Pruess has aphantasia and can play multiple simultaneous blindfold games. Pretty much everyone at my level (2000 USCF) can play blindfold. I always assumed that I was completely unable to because of my aphantasia, but when I heard about Pruess's story, I decided to work on it, and I now can, although with difficulty and very slowly. Basically I still keep around all the information about where all the pieces are; it's just not on a virtual board that I "look" at, it's stored more abstractly. I keep track of clusters of pieces and relations between them. The fact that I have an excellent sense of the board itself (I know how all the squares relate instinctively) helps. But I still have to stop all the time and confirm where all the pieces are (or, conversely, what's on every square).
- dfan 2y ago
  As an addendum, when I calculate variations in chess or Go I sometimes close my eyes because my "board database access" can be easier to operate when everything is purely in my head, as opposed to performing mental diffs on the physical board in front of me, which requires me to keep track of both real and virtual pieces.
somenameforme 2y ago
I'm reasonably decent at chess, around 2500 Lichess blitz, and I also started chess as an adult. And in my experience visualization was 100% a trained/learned skill. Like all players when I was weaker I had no board visualization, and would have difficulty visualizing even simple variations. And then at some point I began to be able to see the board easily. The counter-intuitive thing is that there was no progress, it was like a stair-step. At some point in my 'career' I couldn't see the board at all, then suddenly I could. I think it has something to do with trained pattern recognition, because now when doing things like tactics problems I can generally look at the position for a few seconds and then close my eyes and get to solving it in my head. But I can't do this in weird positions where there's a bunch of pieces in random locations. So my visualization is clearly impacted by some association with familiar patterns. I also think my experience is the rule based on coaching I've done with players of all ages and skill levels. I suspect most strong players aren't familiar with this, because they started playing as children. Nakamura, for instance, hit national master level at 10 years old. I don't trust his recollection of introspective astract/perceptual detail, as a 6 year old, to be particularly accurate. And if visualization is a trained skill with exponential step style progress, then it's completely unsurprising that people would report radically different abilities to visualize things.
- kolinko 2y ago
  Curious - how does the board look like in your head? Is it a specific 3d board? Or a 2d image of a board? Does it have colour, texture, etc? Does it always look the same? As an aphant I always wondered how can people play chess by just mentioning moves and not get lost - it makes sense if they have a stable picture of their board in their head!
  - somenameforme 2y ago
    For me, it is not like a crystal clear image or anything. It's hazy, but clear enough to work with and think clearly. The image tends to be a sort of abstract snap shot of whatever I'm playing on. So over the board it tends to be in 3d, and online it tends to be in 2d. Colors tend to be muddier/darker versions of whatever scheme I happen to be playing/studying with. An interesting thing is that your eyes tend to move while navigating this board - an interesting sort of connection between the physical and mental even when it's entirely mental. I noticed when Magnus did his blindfold sim in Vienna [1] he'd often tilt his head in a certain direction for each board, so I imagine it was the same thing for him with him having them all kind of setup in his mind, and simply moving his head to look at each board in turn. [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqmzadHNSLs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqmzadHNSLs

by tzs 2y ago

abetusk 2y ago

For what it's worth, there's a study (N=123) on recall for people with aphantansia [0]. One of the tests was to take a look at a picture, of a living room with furniture in it, say, and then have the subject try to redraw the room in as much detail as they can. People with aphantansia have better spatial accuracy and fewer memory errors. The basic hypothesis is, I guess, that people with aphantansia develop scaffolding to help them memorize so they're better at some of the details that other folks that rely too heavily on their mental imagery. I don't know of any studies on chess in particular (though I haven't looked) but I would imagine that something similar could be at play here, where it might not be obvious that people with aphantasia are worse for these types of games. [0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7856239/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7856239/

johnfn 2y ago

I have aphantasia and I play chess (albeit not very well...) Honestly, I think that aphantasia is a bit overhyped; I can do virtually all the things that people with normal mental imagery can do, except I suppose actually visualize the thing in my mind. The way that it works feels akin to a blind man groping in a dark room. If I try to visualize a chess board, of course I only "see" blackness (or nothing), but if you ask me what square is at e2, I can kind of mentally "feel" in that area and know that there's a king pawn there. And I can kind of "feel" below it that there's a king, and a queen, etc. Normal people see things in their visual imagery by directing their attention at a spot in their mind, seeing it, and then registering what they saw. I just skip the middle step.

OvbiousError 2y ago
Interesting. As an aphant I can perhaps do what you describe, what I can absolutely not do is e.g. calculate moves with my eyes closed. I can calculate a couple of moves in, but then it gets hard, and I'm not sure if this is something solveable with practice or just a hard stop. Similarly, the top chess players can remember a lot of the matches they played, and others they studied. This is not something my brain is able to do, period. Similar to how I have less personal memories than a lot of other people.
KK7NIL 2y ago
I'm about 1800-2000 on lichess and have almost complete aphantasia and I do feel like it really hurts me, especially in very sharp middlegame positions. When calculating I have to explicitly list out what squares are attacked by what pieces, which is inevitably very slow. Long term positional planning isn't a problem as I can feel my way around a position pretty well and can imagine positions I want to reach, but detail heavy calculation is much harder. Doing a lot of deep puzzles is the best antidote I've found.(And blind chess, but that's really hard)

v64 2y ago

Studies have shown that GMs have better mental recall of actual board positions, but if you set the pieces randomly on the board in ways that may be illegal or nonsensical, their recall falls to average. It may be that they're not directly interacting with the visualization, but some mixture of it combined with their knowledge of the position to reconstruct the details.

dfan 2y ago

IM David Pruess has aphantasia and can play multiple simultaneous blindfold games. Pretty much everyone at my level (2000 USCF) can play blindfold. I always assumed that I was completely unable to because of my aphantasia, but when I heard about Pruess's story, I decided to work on it, and I now can, although with difficulty and very slowly. Basically I still keep around all the information about where all the pieces are; it's just not on a virtual board that I "look" at, it's stored more abstractly. I keep track of clusters of pieces and relations between them. The fact that I have an excellent sense of the board itself (I know how all the squares relate instinctively) helps. But I still have to stop all the time and confirm where all the pieces are (or, conversely, what's on every square).

dfan 2y ago
As an addendum, when I calculate variations in chess or Go I sometimes close my eyes because my "board database access" can be easier to operate when everything is purely in my head, as opposed to performing mental diffs on the physical board in front of me, which requires me to keep track of both real and virtual pieces.

somenameforme 2y ago

I'm reasonably decent at chess, around 2500 Lichess blitz, and I also started chess as an adult. And in my experience visualization was 100% a trained/learned skill. Like all players when I was weaker I had no board visualization, and would have difficulty visualizing even simple variations. And then at some point I began to be able to see the board easily. The counter-intuitive thing is that there was no progress, it was like a stair-step. At some point in my 'career' I couldn't see the board at all, then suddenly I could. I think it has something to do with trained pattern recognition, because now when doing things like tactics problems I can generally look at the position for a few seconds and then close my eyes and get to solving it in my head. But I can't do this in weird positions where there's a bunch of pieces in random locations. So my visualization is clearly impacted by some association with familiar patterns. I also think my experience is the rule based on coaching I've done with players of all ages and skill levels. I suspect most strong players aren't familiar with this, because they started playing as children. Nakamura, for instance, hit national master level at 10 years old. I don't trust his recollection of introspective astract/perceptual detail, as a 6 year old, to be particularly accurate. And if visualization is a trained skill with exponential step style progress, then it's completely unsurprising that people would report radically different abilities to visualize things.

kolinko 2y ago
Curious - how does the board look like in your head? Is it a specific 3d board? Or a 2d image of a board? Does it have colour, texture, etc? Does it always look the same? As an aphant I always wondered how can people play chess by just mentioning moves and not get lost - it makes sense if they have a stable picture of their board in their head!
- somenameforme 2y ago
  For me, it is not like a crystal clear image or anything. It's hazy, but clear enough to work with and think clearly. The image tends to be a sort of abstract snap shot of whatever I'm playing on. So over the board it tends to be in 3d, and online it tends to be in 2d. Colors tend to be muddier/darker versions of whatever scheme I happen to be playing/studying with. An interesting thing is that your eyes tend to move while navigating this board - an interesting sort of connection between the physical and mental even when it's entirely mental. I noticed when Magnus did his blindfold sim in Vienna [1] he'd often tilt his head in a certain direction for each board, so I imagine it was the same thing for him with him having them all kind of setup in his mind, and simply moving his head to look at each board in turn. [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqmzadHNSLs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqmzadHNSLs