“Visual thinking is often driven more strongly by the conceptual knowledge we use to organize our images than by the contents of the images themselves. Chess masters are known for their remarkable memory for the pieces on a chessboard. But it's not because people with photographic memories become chess masters. The masters are no better than beginners when remembering a board of randomly arranged pieces. Their memory captures meaningful relations among the pieces, such as threats and defenses, not just their distribution in space.”

—  Steven Pinker, book How the Mind Works

Source: How the Mind Works (1997), p. 295

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Steven Pinker33
psychologist, linguist, author 1954

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