ABSTRACT
What cognitive processes underlie experts' performance in their domain of expertise? This question has been addressed by many cognitive psychologists in various domains, such as chess (e.g., Chase & Simon, 1973; Gobet & Simon, 1996), or sport (e.g., Garland & Barry, 1991; Poplu, Baratgin, Mavromatis, & Ripoll, 2003). The template theory (Gobet & Simon, 1996), which unifies low-level knowledge, such as chunks, with high-level knowledge, such as schematic knowledge (Gobet, 1998), provides a strong theoretical framework to account for expert behaviour. This theory proposes that, when perceiving a game pattern, experts players access chunks stored in long term memory (LTM) by filtering perceptual features through a discrimination net (Gobet 1998). The discriminated chunk will give access to semantic memory, allowing experts to understand the subtleties of the pattern and rapidly make appropriate decisions. Thus, perceptual discrimination of game patterns would be, in part, responsible for the quickness and the appropriateness of decisions that characterize expert behaviour.
