Expertise in cognitive psychology: testing the hypothesis of long-term working memory in a study of soccer players

This experiment compared several theories of expertise and exceptional performances in cognitive psychology. One current conception assumes that experts in a specific domain have developed a long-term working memory, which accounts for the difference in memory performance between experts and novices. The principal characteristics of this memory are the speed with which processes of storage and retrieval function and the existence of retrieval structures that allow a temporary activation of the knowledge store in long-term memory. Other authors such as Vicente and Wang argue this notion does not account for memory performance that is not intrinsic to the domain of expertise. We attempt to clarify the two viewpoints and to focus on this debate by testing the hypothesis of long-term working memory using soccer as the domain of expertise and by comparing the cognitive performance of participants who have different expertise (novices, supporters, players, and coaches). 35 male participants were administered a new version of the Reading Span test to assess their long-term working memory according to two conditions. In the first condition (structured condition), the last word of each sentence was related to the soccer domain, and these words were related to each other in such a manner that they represented a part of the game. In the second condition (unstructured condition), the last word of each sentence was related to soccer but these words did not represent part of the game. Analysis showed that the sentence span increased as a function of expertise for the structured condition but not for the unstructured condition. The results were interpreted in the framework of the constraint attunement hypothesis proposed by Vicente in 1992 and the long-term working memory hypothesis proposed by Ericsson and Kintsch in 1995.