TY - JOUR
T1 - Are the advantages of chess expertise on visuo-spatial working-memory capacity domain specific or domain general?
AU - Smith, Evan T.
AU - Bartlett, James C.
AU - Krawczyk, Daniel C.
AU - Basak, Chandramallika
N1 - Funding Information:
CB, ETS, JCB, and DCK planned and designed the study, ETS programmed the study, collected data, and analyzed the data, CB supervised the project, and ETS and CB wrote the paper. The authors would like to thank Sean Kothapally for assisting us in this research along with Jim Stallings and the chess team of University of Texas at Dallas for participating in this research. We dedicate this paper to the memory of James C. Bartlett, a mentor, friend, and valued collaborator.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021, The Psychonomic Society, Inc.
PY - 2021/11
Y1 - 2021/11
N2 - Chess experts have repeatedly demonstrated exceptional recall of chessboards, which is weakened by disruption of the chessboard. However, chess experts still perform better than novices when recalling such disrupted chessboards, suggesting a somewhat generalized expertise effect. In the current study, we examined the extent of this generalized expertise effect on early processing of visuo-spatial working memory (VSWM), by comparing 14 chess experts (Elo rating > 2000) and 15 novices on a change-detection paradigm using disrupted chessboards, where attention had to be selectively deployed to either visual or spatial features, or divided across both features. The paradigm differed in the stimuli used (domain-specific chess pieces vs. novel visual shapes) to evaluate domain-general effects of chess expertise. Both experts and novices had greater memory discriminability for chess stimuli than for the unfamiliar stimuli, suggesting a salience advantage for familiar stimuli. Experts, however, demonstrated better memory discriminability than novices not only for chess stimuli presented on these disrupted chessboards, but also for novel, domain-general stimuli, particularly when detecting spatial changes. This expertise advantage was greater for chessboards with supra-capacity set sizes. For set sizes within the working-memory capacity, the expertise advantage was driven by enhanced selective attention to spatial features by chess experts when compared to visual features. However, any expertise-related VSWM advantage disappeared in the absence of the 8 × 8 chessboard display, which implicates the chessboard display as an essential perceptual aspect facilitating the “expert memory effect” in chess, albeit one that might generalize beyond strictly domain-relevant stimuli.
AB - Chess experts have repeatedly demonstrated exceptional recall of chessboards, which is weakened by disruption of the chessboard. However, chess experts still perform better than novices when recalling such disrupted chessboards, suggesting a somewhat generalized expertise effect. In the current study, we examined the extent of this generalized expertise effect on early processing of visuo-spatial working memory (VSWM), by comparing 14 chess experts (Elo rating > 2000) and 15 novices on a change-detection paradigm using disrupted chessboards, where attention had to be selectively deployed to either visual or spatial features, or divided across both features. The paradigm differed in the stimuli used (domain-specific chess pieces vs. novel visual shapes) to evaluate domain-general effects of chess expertise. Both experts and novices had greater memory discriminability for chess stimuli than for the unfamiliar stimuli, suggesting a salience advantage for familiar stimuli. Experts, however, demonstrated better memory discriminability than novices not only for chess stimuli presented on these disrupted chessboards, but also for novel, domain-general stimuli, particularly when detecting spatial changes. This expertise advantage was greater for chessboards with supra-capacity set sizes. For set sizes within the working-memory capacity, the expertise advantage was driven by enhanced selective attention to spatial features by chess experts when compared to visual features. However, any expertise-related VSWM advantage disappeared in the absence of the 8 × 8 chessboard display, which implicates the chessboard display as an essential perceptual aspect facilitating the “expert memory effect” in chess, albeit one that might generalize beyond strictly domain-relevant stimuli.
KW - Attentional control
KW - Chess expertise
KW - Selective attention
KW - Spatial working memory
KW - Visual working memory
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U2 - 10.3758/s13421-021-01184-z
DO - 10.3758/s13421-021-01184-z
M3 - Article
C2 - 34128184
AN - SCOPUS:85107934993
SN - 0090-502X
VL - 49
SP - 1600
EP - 1616
JO - Memory and Cognition
JF - Memory and Cognition
IS - 8
ER -