One problem / phenomenon I've noticed (and I'm sure you have too, even if subconsciously), is how difficult it can be to "lock on" to a square on a chess board. Even at a fairly high level, I recently saw WFM Anna Cramling blunder a rook to IM Levy Rozman because she mistook one diagonal for an adjacent diagonal in a blitz game.
I suspect that this is because the repetitive checkered pattern of a chessboard is dazzling, like how a zebra's stripes, or a school of identical fish helps confuse predators.
If so, Cramling's error was due to what's called a "barber pole" illusion, where eye motion causes the brain to think that an object with a repetitive pattern has moved. Notice the similarity between the alternating stripes of a chessboard diagonal, and the alternating diagonal lines of a barber pole.
This means that as chess players, we're using a board with a pattern so confusing that it's used for camouflage, illusion and deceit.
Although this pattern is fine, I think, for actually playing a game, when our focus is mostly on the pieces, and not on the board, it can be confusing when trying to learn, visualize, and "memorize" the board. For this reason, many visualization techniques I've seen work on breaking up this dazzling pattern, by adding lines and markers - landmarks, basically. And in at least one case (mine), using a 3D chessboard so that perspective makes the board look less repetitive.
Also, splitting a board into quadrants helps reduce this repetitiveness (since each quadrant has fewer lines and diagonals to repeat), even leverages this repetitiveness to compact the mental model of a board, since each quadrant is identical.
What techniques have you used to better deal with the dazzling task of memorizing a chessboard?
One problem / phenomenon I've noticed (and I'm sure you have too, even if subconsciously), is how difficult it can be to "lock on" to a square on a chess board. Even at a fairly high level, I recently saw WFM Anna Cramling blunder a rook to IM Levy Rozman because she mistook one diagonal for an adjacent diagonal in a blitz game.
I suspect that this is because the repetitive checkered pattern of a chessboard is dazzling, like how a zebra's stripes, or a school of identical fish helps confuse predators.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dazzle_camouflage
If so, Cramling's error was due to what's called a "barber pole" illusion, where eye motion causes the brain to think that an object with a repetitive pattern has moved. Notice the similarity between the alternating stripes of a chessboard diagonal, and the alternating diagonal lines of a barber pole.
Although this pattern is fine, I think, for actually playing a game, when our focus is mostly on the pieces, and not on the board, it can be confusing when trying to learn, visualize, and "memorize" the board. For this reason, many visualization techniques I've seen work on breaking up this dazzling pattern, by adding lines and markers - landmarks, basically. And in at least one case (mine), using a 3D chessboard so that perspective makes the board look less repetitive.
Also, splitting a board into quadrants helps reduce this repetitiveness (since each quadrant has fewer lines and diagonals to repeat), even leverages this repetitiveness to compact the mental model of a board, since each quadrant is identical.
What techniques have you used to better deal with the dazzling task of memorizing a chessboard?