How Chess Strengthens Your Child's Working Memory

By Lalit Akhade, Founder & Head Coach, ChessMates Academy · Published 2026-09-08 · 5 min read

The Memory Skill Nobody Talks About

Ask most parents what chess does for a child's memory, and they'll say something like "it helps them remember things better" — which isn't wrong, but it's vague enough to be almost meaningless. There's a much more specific skill at work, one cognitive scientists call visuospatial working memory: the ability to hold a mental picture of something in your mind and manipulate it, rather than just storing a fact for later.

It's the skill your child uses to follow multi-step instructions without needing them repeated ("get your shoes, grab your water bottle, then wait by the door"), to do mental math without writing it down, and to picture how a paragraph they just read connects to the one before it. A 2025 study out of Russia's Federal Scientific Center of Psychological and Multidisciplinary Research, published in *Frontiers in Psychology*, found it's also a skill chess classes measurably strengthen in children as young as five and six.

What the Study Actually Found

Researchers compared two groups of 5- and 6-year-olds — 44 who attended regular chess classes and 44 who didn't — matched so both groups had similar backgrounds and similar levels of involvement in other extracurricular activities. That last detail matters: it's easy for a study to show that "enrichment kids" do better on cognitive tests, but much harder to show that the enrichment itself, rather than just being the kind of family that signs kids up for classes, is doing the work.

Here, the two groups looked alike on paper except for one thing: whether they played chess. The chess-playing group scored significantly higher on tests of visuospatial working memory than the non-players did. Nothing about the study claims chess is magic, and the researchers were careful to frame it as one piece of a larger, ongoing picture of how chess classes relate to executive function in young children — but it's a genuinely useful, specific data point, not another vague "chess is good for the brain" claim.

Why This Particular Skill Matters So Much

Working memory gets a lot of attention from researchers because it's a strong predictor of school performance in young children — arguably a better one than IQ at that age. Visuospatial working memory specifically covers anything that involves picturing space, position, or movement in your head: remembering where you left something without looking, tracking a couple of moving objects at once, or reconstructing a diagram from memory a few minutes later.

A chessboard is a near-perfect training ground for exactly this. Every legal move a child considers, they have to picture happening before it happens — where a piece will land, what it will threaten from that new square, what their opponent might do in response, and how the board will look two or three moves later. None of that is visible in front of them; it all has to be held and updated in their head. Do that hundreds of times a game, several times a week, and it's not surprising the skill sharpens with use, the same way a muscle does under repeated load.

This is a close cousin to what we've written separately about chess and memory and chess and spatial intelligence — but it deserves its own mention, because "holding a changing picture in your head" is a more specific skill than either general memory or static spatial reasoning, and it's the one this particular study measured directly.

What This Looks Like in an Actual Lesson

You won't see a coach announce "today we're building working memory." It shows up quietly, inside ordinary chess skills:

Calculating a few moves ahead. Before a child is allowed to move a piece, a good coach asks them to say out loud what happens next, and the move after that — forcing them to hold a short sequence in mind rather than just reacting to what's in front of them.
Visualizing without touching pieces. Puzzle work, including free tactical puzzles, often asks a child to find the solution mentally before confirming it on the board — a direct visuospatial working memory exercise disguised as a game.
Reconstructing a game from memory. More advanced students are sometimes asked to replay a game they just finished, move by move, without looking anything up — genuinely difficult at first, and noticeably easier with practice.

None of this needs to be gamified further to work. It's just what a normal, well-taught chess lesson already looks like — the cognitive benefit is a byproduct of playing real chess well, not a separate curriculum bolted on top.

What Parents Can Do at Home

You don't need a chess set to reinforce this specific skill, though having one certainly helps. A few low-effort habits lean on the same muscle:

Ask "what happens next?" during any game — checkers, a video game, even a board game with dice. Getting a child to predict one step ahead before acting builds the same underlying skill chess does.
Try a short "memory peek." After a few moves on a real board, cover it and ask your child to describe where two or three specific pieces are, from memory, before uncovering it to check.
Resist setting up the board for them. Letting your child set up the starting position from memory, square by square, is a small but real visuospatial memory workout that most kids skip because a parent — or an app — usually does it for them.

If your child already takes lessons, a structured curriculum that builds calculation practice in gradually, rather than jumping straight into fast games, tends to build this skill more reliably than unstructured play alone.

A Skill Worth Noticing

It's easy to focus on the parts of chess progress that are visible — a rating number, a tournament result, a checkmate pattern finally learned. Working memory gains are quieter. You're more likely to notice them as "my child seems to be following multi-step homework instructions better" than as anything chess-specific. That's exactly why research like this matters — it puts a name and a number on something that would otherwise be easy to miss.

If you're curious what this kind of thinking looks like in a real lesson with your own child, ChessMates runs a free trial class where a coach works through exactly this kind of calculation and visualization with them directly — no pressure, just a chance to see how they think. You can book one here.