Chess experts have repeatedly demonstrated exceptional recall of chessboards, which is weakened by disruption of the chessboard. However, chess experts still perform better than novices when recalling such disrupted chessboards, suggesting a somewhat generalized expertise effect. In the current study, we examined the extent of this generalized expertise effect on early processing of visuo-spatial working memory (VSWM), by comparing 14 chess experts (Elo rating > 2000) and 15 novices on a change-detection paradigm using disrupted chessboards, where attention had to be selectively deployed to either visual or spatial features, or divided across both features. The paradigm differed in the stimuli used (domain-specific chess pieces vs. novel visual shapes) to evaluate domain-general effects of chess expertise. Both experts and novices had greater memory discriminability for chess stimuli than for the unfamiliar stimuli, suggesting a salience advantage for familiar stimuli. Experts, however, demonstrated better memory discriminability than novices not only for chess stimuli presented on these disrupted chessboards, but also for novel, domain-general stimuli, particularly when detecting spatial changes. This expertise advantage was greater for chessboards with supra-capacity set sizes. For set sizes within the working-memory capacity, the expertise advantage was driven by enhanced selective attention to spatial features by chess experts when compared to visual features. However, any expertise-related VSWM advantage disappeared in the absence of the 8 × 8 chessboard display, which implicates the chessboard display as an essential perceptual aspect facilitating the “expert memory effect” in chess, albeit one that might generalize beyond strictly domain-relevant stimuli.

国际象棋专家一再表现出对棋盘的异常回忆，这会因棋盘的破坏而减弱。然而，在回忆这种被打乱的棋盘时，国际象棋专家仍然比新手表现更好，这表明具有某种普遍的专业知识效应。在当前的研究中，我们通过比较 14 位国际象棋专家（Elo 等级 > 2000）和 15 位新手使用中断棋盘的变化检测范式，研究了这种广义专业知识对视觉空间工作记忆 (VSWM) 早期处理的影响程度，其中注意力必须有选择地部署到视觉或空间特征，或者分散在这两个特征上。范式在使用的刺激（特定领域的棋子与新颖的视觉形状）方面有所不同，以评估国际象棋专业知识的领域一般影响。与不熟悉的刺激相比，专家和新手对国际象棋刺激的记忆辨别力更强，表明对熟悉的刺激具有显着优势。然而，专家们表现出比新手更好的记忆辨别力，不仅在这些被打乱的棋盘上呈现的国际象棋刺激方面，而且在新颖的、领域一般的刺激方面，尤其是在检测空间变化时。对于具有超容量集大小的棋盘，这种专业知识优势更大。对于工作记忆容量内的集合大小，与视觉特征相比，国际象棋专家对空间特征的选择性关注增强，从而推动了专业知识的优势。然而，在没有 8 × 8 棋盘显示的情况下，任何与专业知识相关的 VSWM 优势都消失了，