RECALL OF RAPIDLY PRESENTED RANDOM CHESS POSITIONS IS A FUNCTION OF SKILL

A widely cited result asserts that experts' superiority over novices i n recalling meaningful material from their domain of expertise vanishe s when they are confronted with random material. A review of recent ch ess experiments in which random positions served as control material ( presentation time between 3 and 10 sec) shows, however, that strong pl ayers generally maintain some superiority over weak players even with random positions, although the relative difference between skill level s is much smaller than with game positions. The implications of this f inding for expertise in chess are discussed and the question of the re call of random material in other domains is raised.