Novice construction of chess memory

Novice acquisition of skilled recall of chess positions was studied in an e xperiment in which two novices studied a series of five hundred chess posit ions during a period of several months. They spent fifteen minutes to half an hour a day leaching themselves these positions. As a result their skill in recalling chess positions rose from sixteen percent to somewhere between forty to fifty percent. The learning curve proved to have a shape which in dicates that in the beginning learning is very fast but after some 100-150 studied positions the speed of learning decreases substantially. A computer simulation was used to model the results and analyse alternative explanations. Two alternative ways of thinking were tested. In the first, chunk construction was assumed to be based on the neighbourhood of associat ed pieces. The second model assumed a frequency-based correlative associati on process. Although the learning curves of the two models are very similar in shape to those of the subjects, the frequency-based associative model g ave a better explanation for the data. This is why it is natural to suggest that common co-occurrence in addition to easily recognizable chess-specifi c characteristics, like colour and type of pieces, guide associative proces ses during chess players' learning of chess-specific chunks.