Chase, William G., and Herbert A. Simon. 1973. “Perception in chess.” Cognitive Psychology.

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Given a perception task and a memory task from a briefly exposed position, chess players of varying strength extract different amounts of information according to their strength. Superior performance of stronger players depends on their ability “to encode the position into larger perceptual chunks, each consisting of a familiar subconfiguration of pieces.” There is evidence that pieces converging on the opponent’s king (or other) position are chunked in a more abstract attack relation. “Finally, the number of chunks retained in short-term memory after brief exposure to chess positions is about the magnitude we would predict from immediate recall of common words … and copying of visual patterns.”

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