Bonus post: If you're interested at all in chess and blindfold chess, this is a really great book. Lots of cool first-hand accounts throughout history of how different masters approach blindfold chess. This book also covers a lot of the foundational studies of chess psychology.

We also had a few people who reported no mental imagery at all (aphantasics), but one which still had a high Elo (top 10% of our sample). But unlike the other two aphantasics, this one participant reported using visualization strategies. They also did well on the objective imagery task! 11/?

Better players were more accurate on the task, whereas more vivid imagers had faster reaction times. We also found some interesting effects of board position on accuracy and RT. So both subjective imagery vividness and objective accuracy on our imagery probe task predicted chess skill! 10/?

We also designed a task to try to get an "objective" measure of imagery. Participants were asked to imagine a chess board within a square on the screen. A green dot appeared somewhere on the screen, and participants had to indicate whether it was at the location of a black or white square. 9/?

Consistent with our predictions, we found that chess skill (Elo) was positively associated with imagery vividness! This was true both for general imagery vividness (VVIQ) as chess-specific imagery (e.g., trying to solve a puzzle). In other words, stronger players have more vivid imagery! 8/?

There's also a long tradition in chess of playing games "blindfolded" and not even being able to view the board. Surely this must require mental imagery! And yet, throughout history there are anecdotes of very strong blindfold chess players who report not using mental imagery at all. 5/?

Would it though?

I love this little tidbit I found on the EEGLAB website regarding why MATLAB and not Python:

I can't remember who I stole this idea from so apologies for not acknowledging you, but I created a NYT Connections-style bonus for my Perception exam:

Feeling particularly Canadian lately so I took the lab curling. 🇨🇦🥌

proof

Reuben approved

Made some homemade English muffins for the annual New Year's Day eggs Benedict. Was it worth it? Almost definitely not. Also shout out to Kenji Lopez-Alt for his hollandaise method.

My second sabbatical is decidedly much less glamorous than my first one. No trip to Germany. Just doing some data analysis in a McDonald's while I wait for my car to get serviced. Still going to miss it.

There's a fun word for Perception profs and vision nerds in today's @nytimes.com Spelling Bee:

Office view upgrade: