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PaperclipPerfector  2yr ago (text post)   5723 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 10, 2023

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It’s well-known that children learn chess and languages faster than adults. I’m curious: if you take a kid and put him through an intensive chess program, what are the trade-off costs for other aspects of cognitive development?

For instance, you can do two hours of chess, or you can do two hours of social interaction where they will learn visual-facial cues and auditory-expressive cues and other valuable information. You can do two hours of Spanish, or you can do two hours of self-reflection on a long walk, where they will learn how to filter and organize their past memories and discern what they actually like and dislike.

Some of the traded-off benefits are significant but impossible to measure. Spending time “listening to your body” before and after activities, eg eating certain things or spending time with certain people, builds a valuable collection of associations between activities and wellbeing. Spending time socializing will teach a kid how to recognize cues of trust and distrust, who to imitate and who not to, and so on.

Are you implying that learning chess aids a child's cognitive development?

No, I’m saying that learning chess enhances certain parts of cognition, most of which are limited to chess. In other words, they learn chess and implicit secondary things in the process of learning chess.

The question being asked is about the significance of trading off “unmeasurable learning” in favor of chess-related learning. The broader question outside of this specifically would be, “what are the unmeasurable trade-odds when we raise a child to be prodigious in only obvious measurable skills”?

Right. Well, it would be impossible to quantify without a huge study.

But I suppose the simple, rough answer is to look at everything that chess makes strong use of, and then assume that everything else suffers somewhat from under-use. Chess teaches you pattern recognition more than anything, and visuospatial working memory for planning sequences, visualisation, and I suppose, keeping track of relative values of pieces.

Then there are the trade-offs outside the cognitive. A kid who does nothing but play chess in his free time becomes a chess nerd. I wouldn't want my child to do it. Chess is very much a winner-take-all field. Only the top 50 players or so in the world make good money from it, out of millions of serious players. As someone whose name I forget said: "Knowing how to play chess is the sign of a gentleman. Knowing how to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life."

Hilariously, the quote is from Paul Morphy.

All game-playing does, to a certain degree for each type of gameplay loop and ruleset. Dominoes and Go Fish aid in cognitive development. When I started playing Bloxorz in my twenties, I could feel my brain stretching with each level I completed.

My understanding is that cognitive skill development is fairly specific, and that research into far transfer from games (or anything) to unrelated cognitive tasks has pretty much been a total bust.

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