ABSTRACT
T hanks to Bill Chase, we know much more about the development of expertise than we would if this energetic, insightful, and influential researcher had not graced our discipline. Bill Chase, along with Anders Ericsson, showed that people can remember much more than you would think if you subscribed to the view that memory capacity is a fixed feature of the rememberer. Chase and Ericsson (1981) showed that people can remember more incoming information as they get increasingly skilled at using cognitive strategies for relating that information to material already established in their memories. The amount that individuals can remember grows to levels that seem almost super-human if they successfully relate what comes in to what they already know. The benefits to learning are specific to the materials to which the strategy is applied, however, implying that short-term memory does not simply bulk up as a result of experience. What grows is the capacity for relating incoming information to already formed chunks.
