Psychology

References and comments on psychological work related to Go.

• Robert Jasiek. Psychology. This go book discusses the psychological mistakes, which frequently occur in go games, of wishful thinking, carelessness, laziness and greed, and their relation to strategic concepts, time trouble and winning a won game.

• Burmeister, Jay. Studies in Human and Computer Go: Assessing the Game of Go as a Research Domain for Cognitive Science. PhD thesis, The University of Queensland, 2001.

• Pearson, Helen. Chess and GO no-brainers. (Subscription required.) The board games chess and GO take practice, not intellect, brain scans of players suggest. Intelligence areas appear inactive when people puzzle over game strategy.

• Peter Shotwell. Go and Cognition. (Good overview of research in this area.)

• Xiangchuan Chen, Daren Zhang, Xiaochu Zhang, Zhihao Li, Xiaomei Meng, Sheng He and Xiaoping Hu. A functional MRI study of high-level cognition -II. The game of GO. Cognitive Brain Research, Volume 16, Issue 1, March 2003, Pages 32-37. Abstract: GO is a board game thought to be different from chess in many aspects, most significantly in that GO emphasizes global strategy more than local battle, a property very difficult for computer programs to emulate. To investigate the neural basis of GO, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to measure brain activities of subjects engaged in playing GO. Enhanced activations were observed in many cortical areas, such as dorsal prefrontal, parietal, occipital, posterior temporal, and primary somatosensory and motor areas. Quantitative analysis indicated a modest degree of stronger activation in right parietal area than in left. This type of right hemisphere lateralization differs from the modest left hemisphere lateralization observed during chess playing.

See also

• Mental Activity and MentalActivity/Discussion

• the debate on Madness and Chess

• GoEtiquette/Discussion