Neuroscientist Dr. Chen claims that the apparent ability of expert chess players to memorize board positions is not due to a generally superior memory but instead to a domain-specific skill: experts recognize meaningful patterns of pieces. Critics argue that experts simply have better visual memory overall.
Which finding, if true, would most strongly support Dr. Chen's claim against the critics?
- A
Expert players were once novices and gradually improved with practice.
- B
Expert players also tend to be skilled at memorizing strings of digits.
- C
Expert players have, on average, larger hippocampi than novices.
- Dcheck_circle
Expert players outperform novices in recalling realistic chess positions but perform no better than novices in recalling random arrangements of pieces.
Explanation
A is the classic Chase-Simon dissociation: expertise advantage disappears for random positions, undermining a general-memory account and supporting the pattern-recognition (domain-specific) account. D would support the critics' general-memory view; B and C are tangential.