Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Perceptual reasoning is the ability that incorporates fluid reasoning, spatial processing, and visual motor integration.Several theories of cognitive functioning emphasize the importance of fluid reasoning. Tasks that require fluid reasoning involvethe process of manipulating abstractions, rules, generalizations, and logical relationships. A pretest–posttest with control groupdesign was used, with 43 (28 boys, 15 girls) children in the experimental group and 42 (26 boys, 16 girls) children in thecontrol group. The sample was selected from children studying in two private schools from South India, which includedboth the genders. The experimental group underwent weekly one-hour chess training for one year. Perceptual reasoning wasmeasured by three subtests of WISC-IV INDIA. Pre-equivalence of means was established. Statistical analyses revealed thatthe experimental group shows statistically significant improvement in perceptual reasoning compared to the control group. Thepresent study establishes a correlation between chess learning and perceptual reasoning.