On the Ecological Validity of Memory Research: Generalization to Memory for Chess Positions

Although there is often a tradeoff between experimental control and ecological validity, there are good arguments that the study of memory for chess positions allows a high level of both. For example, chess is a very complex game, and remembering chess positions is in many ways comparable to the memory involved in real-world tasks. Accordingly, chess has been called the Drosophila of cognitive science. This article reviews several key findings in memory and assesses whether they generalize to memory for chess positions. Specifically, research on the role of thinking and comprehension on memory, memory’s reconstructive nature, contextual effects on memory, and the effects of encoding instructions on memory are reviewed. In each of these cases, established memory phenomena generalize to the chess domain. This demonstrates that key findings from experimental memory studies hold in contexts outside the ones in which they were discovered and supports the ecological validity and generality of these findings.