Recognition Memory for Chess Positions: Some Preliminary Research

Two important variables affecting recall of chess positions, chess skill and meaningfulness of the material, were investigated in the context of a forcedchoice recognition task. A strict interpretation of Chase and Simon's 1973 model (in Chase, Ed., Visual Information Processing), it is argued, would predict no skill effects. In their model, skill-level differences result from differences in the amount of information encoded, which in turn reflects differences in the characteristic size of units used in encoding. A recognition task does not require complete encoding of the stimulus, and hence should show little skill effect. Nevertheless, recognition accuracy was strongly influenced by chess experience in two different experiments. Analysis of protocols and patterns of recognition for random positions suggested that dynamic features generated during analysis of a position formed a component of the memory representation of that position, especially for better players.