It went more quickly with Alfaerie, because it's easier to spot differences in color than differences in orientation. However, while doing it with Alfaerie, I was not taking any time to get any sense of the position, yet I would certainly have to do that if I were playing Shogi. Also, Shogi does not progress from one random position to another. The position changes incrementally, starting from a position where I already know where everything is without even looking at it. So, I would be able to use my knowledge of previous positions to understand what the slightly new position is.
There are only two cases where I might need more time to figure out what the position is. One is when I am doing problems instead of playing a game, and the other is when an opponent has taken a long time to move in a correspondence game, and the position is no longer fresh in my mind. In each of these two cases, though, I would have time to examine the position.
Using Kanji pieces, I can sometimes not be aware of what every piece is, but I am aware of what each piece is with the Motif pieces, and in actual play, I have not had any problem telling my pieces from my opponent's.
So I do not expect that using differently colored pieces instead of differently oriented pieces would seriously improve my ability to understand positions while actually playing Shogi. And if there is any performance improvement to be gained, it remains less than the performance improvement gained from using pieces I can easily recognize.
Additionally, using wedge-shaped pieces adds some authenticity to the experience of playing Shogi, sort of like watching anime with subtitles over the original audio instead of dubs in my own language, and it allows the use of color for distinguishing between promoted and unpromoted pieces. By not using color to distinguish them, the Alfaerie set makes it harder to spot promoted pieces. So, if you made a similar test for spotting promoted pieces, Motif would do much better than Alfaerie.
It went more quickly with Alfaerie, because it's easier to spot differences in color than differences in orientation. However, while doing it with Alfaerie, I was not taking any time to get any sense of the position, yet I would certainly have to do that if I were playing Shogi. Also, Shogi does not progress from one random position to another. The position changes incrementally, starting from a position where I already know where everything is without even looking at it. So, I would be able to use my knowledge of previous positions to understand what the slightly new position is.
There are only two cases where I might need more time to figure out what the position is. One is when I am doing problems instead of playing a game, and the other is when an opponent has taken a long time to move in a correspondence game, and the position is no longer fresh in my mind. In each of these two cases, though, I would have time to examine the position.
Using Kanji pieces, I can sometimes not be aware of what every piece is, but I am aware of what each piece is with the Motif pieces, and in actual play, I have not had any problem telling my pieces from my opponent's.
So I do not expect that using differently colored pieces instead of differently oriented pieces would seriously improve my ability to understand positions while actually playing Shogi. And if there is any performance improvement to be gained, it remains less than the performance improvement gained from using pieces I can easily recognize.
Additionally, using wedge-shaped pieces adds some authenticity to the experience of playing Shogi, sort of like watching anime with subtitles over the original audio instead of dubs in my own language, and it allows the use of color for distinguishing between promoted and unpromoted pieces. By not using color to distinguish them, the Alfaerie set makes it harder to spot promoted pieces. So, if you made a similar test for spotting promoted pieces, Motif would do much better than Alfaerie.