Skilled imagery and long-term working memory

Experts' mental images are a theoretically important research problem for imagery research because they provide an opportunity to gain information about the conceptual basis of mental images. The problems of imagery and expertise converge naturally in blindfold chess because there players must solely rely on their visual imagery and memory. In this article, we have concentrated specifically on that stage at which the verbally or pictorially given information about a chess move or series of moves is transformed into one or more visuospatial representations. Our experiments show that blindfold chess imagery formation is independent of the modality of presented information, but it essentially depends on the piece location information. Experts' static and dynamic chunks gave them substantial superiority in encoding speed and accuracy compared to medium-level players. We conclude that skilled imagery is built on long-term working-memory retrieval structures and that effective transformation of information between these retrieval structures and visual working memory is required to construct complex mental images.