ArticleCognitive science2025
Time Spent Thinking in Online Chess Reflects the Value of Computation.
Article in Cognitive science, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
9 citing papers in PubMed.
- Speed and quality of complex strategic decisions.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Intuition and deliberation in elite expertise.Cognitive research: principles and implications · 2026Article
- Cognitive modeling of real-world behavior for understanding mental health.Trends in cognitive sciences · 2026Review
- Adaptive planning depth in human problem-solving.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- Expert navigators deploy rational complexity-based decision precaching for large-scale real-world planning.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- The Penn Electrophysiology of Encoding and Retrieval Study.Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition · 2024Article
- A recurrent network model of planning explains hippocampal replay and human behavior.Nature neuroscience · 2024Article
- Automatic discovery and description of human planning strategies.Behavior research methods · 2024Article
- Backward reasoning through AND/OR trees to solve problems.CogSci ... Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Cognitive Science Society (U.S.). Conference · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Human planning tends to be efficient, focusing on a relatively small number of options when considering future paths. Recent proposals have suggested that this efficiency reflects intelligent deployment of the limited resources available for planning. A prediction of this and related proposals is that when individuals spend time thinking should depend on the benefits and costs of additional computation. We tested this hypothesis by measuring how much time humans spent thinking before acting in over 12 million online chess games. Players spent more time thinking in board positions where additional computation was more beneficial. This relationship was greater in stronger players, and was strengthened by considering only the information available to the player at the time of choice. A simple model based on measuring the actual cost of spending time thinking in online chess was able to capture qualitative features of this relationship. These results provide evidence that the amount of time humans spend thinking is appropriately sensitive to the value of computation.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.