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Monday 18 March 2019

Long Term Memory & Expertise


One might think that the memory advantage shown by experts is just a working- memory advantage, but research has shown that their advantage extends to long-term memory. Charness (1976) compared experts’ memory for chess posi- tions immediately after they had viewed the positions or after a 30-s delay filled with an interfering task. Class A chess players showed no loss in recall over the 30-s interval, unlike weaker participants, who showed a great deal of forgetting. Thus, expert chess players, unlike duffers, have an increased capacity to store in- formation about the domain. Interestingly, these participants showed the same poor memory for three-letter trigrams as do ordinary participants. Thus, their increased long-term memory is only for the domain of expertise.
Experts appear to be able to remember more patterns as well as larger patterns. For instance, Chase and Simon (1973) in their study tried to identify the patterns that their participants used to recall the chess- boards. They found that participants would tend to recall a pattern, pause, recall another pattern, pause, and so on. They found that they could use a 2-s pause to identify boundaries between pat- terns. With this objective definition of what a pat- tern is, they could then explore how many patterns were recalled and how large these patterns were. In comparing a master chess player with a begin- ner, they found large differences in both measures. First, the pattern size of the master averaged 3.8 pieces, whereas it was only 2.4 for the beginner. Second, the master also recalled an average of 7.7 patterns per board, whereas the beginner recalled an average of only 5.3. Thus, it seems that the experts’ memory advantage is based not only on larger patterns but also on the ability to recall more of them.
Compelling evidence that expertise requires the ability to remember more patterns as well as larger patterns comes from Chase and Ericsson (1982), who studied the development of a simple but remarkable skill. They watched a participant, called SF, increase his digit span, which is the number of digits that he could repeat after one presentation. , the normal digit span is about 7 or 8 items, just enough to accommodate a telephone num- ber. After about 200 hr of practice, SF was able to recall 81 random digits pre- sented at the rate of 1 digit per second.  his memory span grew with practice.
What was behind this apparently superhuman feat of memory? In part, SF was learning to chunk the digits into meaningful patterns. He was a long- distance runner, and part of his technique was to convert digits into run- ning times. So, he would take 4 digits, such as 3492, and convert them into “Three minutes, 49.2 seconds—near world-record mile time.” Using such a strategy, he could convert a memory span for 7 digits into a memory span for 7 patterns consisting of 3 or 4 digits each. This would get him to a digit span of more than 20, far short of his eventual performance. In addition to this chunking, he developed what Chase and Ericsson called a retrieval structure, which enabled him to recall 22 such patterns. This retrieval structure was very specific; it did not generalize to retrieving letters rather than digits. Chase and Ericsson hypothesized that part of what underlies the development of exper- tise in other domains, such as chess, is the development of retrieval structures, which allows superior recall for past patterns.
■ As people become more expert in a domain, they develop a better ability to store problem information in long-term memory and to re- trieve it.

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