SKILLED IMAGERY AND LONG-TERM WORKING-MEMORY

Experts' mental images are a theoretically important research problem for imagery research because they provide an opportunity to gain infor mation about the conceptual basis of mental images. The problems of im agery and expertise converge naturally in blindfold chess because ther e players must solely rely on their visual imagery and memory. In this article, we have concentrated specifically on that stage at which the verbally or pictorially given information about a chess move ol serie s of moves is transformed into one or more visuospatial representation s. Our experiments show that blindfold chess imagery formation is inde pendent of the modality of presented information, but it essentially d epends on the piece location information. Experts' static and dynamic chunks gave them substantial superiority in encoding speed and accurac y compared to medium-level players. We conclude that skilled imagery i s built on long-term working-memory retrieval structures and that effe ctive transformation of information between these retrieval structures and visual working memory is required to construct complex mental ima ges.