The distinctive feature of another mental operation, "seeing," is that only the final result passes through the center of consciousness. In the "vision" operation, the chess player instantly sees a series of moves united by a common idea, and the intermediate moves occur so quickly that they cannot be passed through the center of consciousness. The role of "vision" in a chess player's thinking is extremely important.

The chess player's thinking is visual, "it is connected with the visual perception of the board, the pieces on the board and the spatial relations between them, as well as with visual representations from previous experience and visual images created by the imagination when thinking about the movement of the pieces in the mind."