This paper compares four current theories of expert memory with respect to chess players' memory: Chase and Simon's (1973) chunking theory, theories stressing the role of conceptual knowledge and levels of encoding, Ericsson and Kintsch's (1995) long-term working memory, and Gobet and Simon's (in press-b) template theory. It is shown that the template theory outperforms its rivals in accounting for the empirical evidence. The theory, which unifies low-level aspects of cognition, such as chunks, with high-level aspects, such as schematic knowledge and planning, suggests that chunks are accessed through a discrimination net, and that they can evolve into more complex data structures (templates) specific to classes of positions.
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