Herbert A. Simon & Fernand Gobet

Expertise Effects in Memory Recall: A Reply to Vicente and Wang. Psychological Review, in press

Abstract

In the January 1998 Psychological Review, Vicente and Wang propose a "constraint attunement hypothesis" to explain the large effects of domain expertise upon memory recall that have been reported over many years in a number of task domains. They claim that there are serious defects in alternative explanations of these findings which their theory overcomes. Re-examination of the evidence they cite shows that: their theory is not novel, but has been anticipated by the researchers they criticize, and that other current published theories of the phenomena do not have the defects Vicente and Wang attribute to them.