Role of High-Level Knowledge in Memory for Chess Positions

Current theories of chess expertise assume that experts can recall meaningful chess positions so well because their encoding and retrieval relies on prior learning of thousands of specific "chunks" of information. However, these theories neglect the role of high-level knowledge that is more abstract than the perceptual chunk. We investigated the role of high-level information in skilled chess memory in three experiments. In the first two experiments, experienced chess players were presented with a high-level verbal description of the position either before or after its presentation. If this type of knowledge facilitates the perception and subsequent recall of chess positions, then recall performance should be better in the description-before condition in which the information is available at the time of perception. In these two experiments, subjects performed better when given the description prior to viewing the position, supporting the proposal that a level of knowledge, beyond that of a set of chunks, is used to perceive a chess position. In the third experiment, subjects reconstructed multiple positions (between 1 and 9) immediately after seeing the entire set. Results indicated that experienced players could reconstruct multiple positions at a level beyond chance or guessing. Again, these results can be better explained in terms of high-level conceptual knowledge associated with each position than in terms of perceptual chunks.