EXPERTISE AND MEMORY DEVELOPMENT - CROSS- SECTIONAL COMPARISON IN THEDOMAIN OF CHESS

The present paper addresses two main research questions: (1) What are the differences between experts within the domain of chess and dropout s of expert careers? (2) How do chess-specific and general memory skil ls change within several years? At two measurements times, 27 experts and novices were studied. The subjects' average age was 12 and 16 year s, respectively. The dropouts proved to have worse memory performance on chess-specific tasks than experts, even at the time of first measur ement. Thus, the assumption of selective dropouts was confirmed which questions the validity of cross-sectional expert-novice comparisons. B oth experts and novices improved their chess-specific memory performan ce between the first and second measurement times. For experts domain- specific factors seem to account for this result, for novices this eff ect is due to general developmental factors.