Memory Processes among Bridge Players of Differing Expertise

An experiment was conducted to study the mnemonic and perceptual abilities of contract-bridge players of differing ability levels. Four subjects (expert, life master, average player, and novice) were administered three tasks designed to explore the possible differences in performance between the players. A tournament-simulation task required subjects to play 10 hands, after which a surprise test was given for the cards in each hand of the 10 deals. A memory task required that subjects reconstruct a briefly presented stimulus containing four bridge hands of either structured or unstructured arrangement. The perception task required that the subjects reconstruct stimuli similar to those used in the memory task after brief glances at the stimulus. The results confirm the findings of research on chess players in that performance in the structured components of each task varied uniformly according to level of expertise but that performance in the unstructured component of each task showed little difference in level of expertise. It was argued that bridge players with supranormal memory are able to use their prior experience to configure and chunk information in more efficient ways than players of less expertise.