Theoretical Development Of The Memory Effect Of Expertise And Applied Research

During over thirty years of expertise research, psychologists have explored expert performance in special domains, which can only be acquired through thousands of hours' practice. Researchers have been led to recognize human expertise from the respective of interaction of knowledge structure and processing ability and have made new explains to human's intelligence. The difference on memory storage has been found to be an important characteristic in expert-novice research. So memory in particular domain has been combined into expertise research.Development of expert memory theories is illustrated detailedly in this paper. Chase and Simon's chunking theory puts emphasis on effects which previous experience have on expert superior performance which is based on recognize of chunks. At the same time, the knowledge-based paradigm argued that hierarchical knowledge organization played an important role on human memory. The skilled memory theory (Chase and Ericsson, 1982) demonstrated how retrieval structure helped expert to perform in recall tasks. Then, Ericsson and Kintsch have extended the skilled memory theory into long-term working memory theory, which explained why experts can perform memory advantage in their own domain. Gobet and Simon's EPAM-TEMP theory used computer procedure to simulate expert superior memory and verified respectively critical roles of mechanism in expert performance, such as chunk, retrieval structure and long-term working memory. Vicente and Wang (1998) proposed a "constraint attunement hypothesis" to explain the large effects of domain expertise on memory recall observed in a number of task domains from an ecological approach.The experiments in this paper illustrate how these theories explain the memory in daily learning by letting middle school students to recall text and words, which demonstrate explanation ability of all theories.The development of theories shows us how expert researches approach- mechanisms of expertise cannot only make qualitative description, but also simulate expert processing model quantitatively. In the future, the development of expertise theories is toward cumulative, unified theory, which can explain memory in all domains and guide training of expert in practice.