Cognitive Modeling of Knowledge-Guided Information Acquisition in Games

Since Chase and Simon presented their influential paper on perception in chess in 1973, the use of chunks has become the subject of a number of studies into the cognitive behavior of human game players. However, the nature of chunks has remained elusive, and the reason for this lies in the lack of using a general cognitive theory to explain the nature of chunks. In this paper it will be argued that Marvin Minsky’s Society of Mind theory is a good candidate for a cognitive theory to define chunks and to explain the relation between chunks and problemsolving tasks. To use Minsky’s Society of Mind theory to model human cognitive behavior in games, we first need to understand more about the primitive agents dealing with the relation between perception and knowledge in memory. To investigate this relation, a reproduction experiment is performed in shogi showing that perception is guided by knowledge in long-term memory. From the results we may conclude that the primitive agents in a cognitive model for game-playing should represent abstract concepts such as board, piece, and king rather than the perceptual features of board and pieces.