> I read about a study where they asked people to remember and recreate positions of pieces on a chess board. People without much chess experience tried to remember the positions of individual pieces, and they generally got most of the positions right. Highly experienced chess players tended to remember the overall positions of the two players, rather than the positions of the individual pieces, and they generally recreated completely different positions in which both sides had roughly the same strength as the positions they were initially shown. Just goes to show that it's not as easy as it seems to remember something that should be familiar to you.
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> ^v^:)^v^
> FB

...really? I recall learning about a similar study in one of my Psychology classes, but getting somewhat different results. The one that I'm thinking about was done by Chase & Simon (1973). (So yeah, it's a bit of an old study, but I haven't heard of any more recent ones on the topic -- if you're thinking of another study, do correct me..)

As I recall, when the chess pieces were put down on the board in a way that might actually occur in a decently-played game then the chess experts were *much* better at remembering exactly where each piece was and were actually pretty good at exact recreation. However, when the pieces were placed on the chess board completely randomly, the expert chess players and normal people did not show any significant different in the positions they could retain.

If you get a lot of training in any particular field, you actually *are* a lot better at remembering those sorts of things due to higher-level chunking processes. However, whatever it is does have to make sense to you in order to be able to do these higher-level processes (which is why expert chess players weren't better at all when the pieces were placed randomly on the board).

-Ka"See? I'm not dead!"z!