Whenever I talk about conceptualization models, I use the terms "visual" and "verbal". But those aren't the technical terms used by researchers.

The technical term for "verbal" is "auditory-sequential". It's not just about words in your head. There's also a strong part of it involving sequences and a sense of story and order. (See Part 3 for more on that.)

Likewise, "visual" isn't just about mental pictures.

The technical term is "visual-spatial". And it's the spatial bit we're going to explore today, because it can be a key feature in some of our otherwise verbal models.

Samuel Rosenthal summed up spatial thinking in Chess best (not that he knew that's what he was doing) when he said it's like "seeing shops on a familiar street while preoccupied."

It's the sense you get of the storefronts to the left and right of you as you walk through a mall. You're not looking at the shops, registering their visual appearance at all. You're just aware they're there. You feel their presence.

While researchers may group spatial and visual thinking together, the experience of them in our Chess, and the models they generate, can be quite different.

I think the great George Koltanowski had a spatial element to his model.

As a recap, he once described his conceptualization model for blindfold games as a "mental gramophone", where he would record the moves audibly in his mind and listen back to them when he needed to remember what's going on. That's about as verbal as a model gets!

He later added a little clarification where he said, "I do not see the board or pieces in my mind; I just remember the moves and 'feel' the position."

It's that feel word that gets me. He didn't say "see", or "hear", or anything along those lines. He said "feel". As if his mental board was something physical to him.

It might be a stretch, but a stretch is sadly as good as we can get with many of these old legends. They were writing at a time where none of this stuff was understood, and we have to do a lot of reading between the lines.

Whether Koltanowski had this spatial, almost-physical sense of a position or not, I've seen plenty of other players who do.

There's a dead giveaway I've noticed for there being some spatial element in a student's model:

When doing blindfold exercises, do you sometimes move your finger around in the air as if pushing miniature pieces around a tiny invisible board?

If you don't do that, it doesn't necessarily mean you don't have a spatial part to your model. But if you do do that, I'd say there's a good chance.

Spatial visualizers are the most common category of thinkers I've found in my work. The research suggests that spatial visualizers are often drawn to activities featuring patterns and structures. Many end up as programmers, mathematicians, doctors, drawn in part by these elements of those professions. Chess certainly falls along the same lines.

Spatial visualization is also, surprisingly, the most common type of model discussed in Chess literature. If you've ever heard the term "lines of force", then you've heard someone talking about spatial conceptualization models, even if they didn't know that's what they were doing.

This series is primarily about verbalizers, but many of us do have a sense of space in our otherwise verbal models. To explain how these spatial elements can work, it's easier to illustrate what happens for visualizers then extrapolate back to the verbalizers. So that's what we'll do.

A common theme with spatial models is that they tend to be less about the pieces themselves and more about the energies and patterns present in the position.

One student of mine has a spatial model where they see an abstract representation of the force each piece exerts across the board. When they focus on their bishop, they don't see a bishop on a square but instead the diagonals they control. This particular student sees these lines of force for several pieces at a time, sensing how they interlink and combine.

He doesn't see the board itself in any particular detail while he does this, though. Just the forces. The boundaries of the board and the squares themselves manifest more like a feeling. Like the shops in Rosenthal's mall.

Another spatial visualizer I work with sees lines of force in a similar way, but only one line of force at a time. Each pattern forms in their mind one-at-a-time like layers of a Photoshop image, one atop another atop another. He cycles through them as he needs to.

First he might see a representation of the pieces along a diagonal, or the pattern of square colors, then switch to the force his knight exerts on that diagonal, then to the squares the opponent's king has available to them. He creates a full sense of the position by collating the relevant details from each of those layers.

For verbal thinkers like myself, these elements aren't likely to show up as strongly as for the visualizers, but we may experience some amount of it.

It's the words and sequences in our mind that hold the most sway, but our brains can sometimes use this sense of space to add context. That spatial awareness may manifest visually, or it may simply remain a feeling.

As pieces move, we may register an almost physical sense of a file opening or closing. We may feel the motion when our bishop charges along the long diagonal to capture that unsuspecting rook. We may get a tingle when that queen moves on to that forkable square, like an invisible puzzle piece clicking into place. There's a pull of some sort of energy there.

In this series, we've discussed a few different ways that verbal models may manifest.

Your mind may flash imagery to assist your words like Alekhine, it may remember the moves and "feel" the space of the position like Koltanowski, or it may create "dirt maps" to ground your stories like my mind does. You might even operate entirely on story and sequence like IM David Pruess or Kevin from Chess Journeys. Or do something else entirely.

I'll be the first to acknowledge I've only seen the tip of the iceberg with this stuff. There's infinite variation in our minds and our psychology. There are likely infinite ways to conceptualize as well. It's encouraging to know my work will never be fully done.

However your mind decides it wants to conceptualize, you'll be fine. No model is better or worse than any other. Each has its strengths and weaknesses.

The only advantage the visual conceptualizers have is that their models make more sense at first glance.

It can be difficult to discover, trust, and accept a verbal conceptualization model. We often find ourselves uncertain exactly how our brain is working out the things it is. It takes a leap of faith to push through that uncertainty.

Hopefully this series has given you some examples of how these verbal models can work. Perhaps you found something that helped explain your own brain.

Relying on words instead of pictures is not lesser, it's not inherently worse.

And, for the love of all that is good, it's certainly not cheating.

Whatever you find works for you is valid.

Refer always to your own brain. Give it the space, time, and trust to work out what it wants to do. Then lean in.

Here's to the journey,
Aiden