The role of emotion in problem solving: first results from observing chess

In this paper we present results from recent experiments that suggest that chess players associate emotions to game situations and reactively use these associations to guide search for planning and problem solving. We report on a pilot experiment with multi-modal observation of human experts engaged in solving challenging problems in Chess. Our results confirm that cognitive processes have observable correlates in displays of emotion and fixation, and that these displays can be used to evaluate models of cognitive processes. They also revealed an unexpected observation of rapid changes in emotion as players attempt to solve challenging problems. In this paper, we propose a cognitive model to explain our observations, and describe initial results from a second experiment designed to test this model.