Chess players' recall of auditorily presented chess positions

Abstract Chess players' recall of auditorily presented chess positions were studied in three experiments. The results of the first two experiments showed that the skilled chess players are better at recalling game and random positions. This contradicts the standard finding that they perform better only in game positions. In the third experiment, the memory load was increased by increasing the number of positions to be recalled simultaneously from one to four positions. Skilled subjects are still far better at recalling game positions, but they score no more than moderately skilled subjects in recalling four random positions. The results are in contradiction with the direct chunking hypothesis. Skilled chess players do not fail to recall random positions because there are no chunks in them, but because they are not, under some special conditions, able to encode them properly. It is necessary to postulate more complicated encoding mechanisms than a simple recognition-based activation of a chunk in long-term...

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