Chess experts are known for their remarkable ability to recall configurations of chess pieces on a board. The researchers tested 14 chess team members, along with 15 chess novices, on rapid-fire processing of visuospatial information in working memory. “Prior studies have shown that chess experts’ advantage in visual memory is limited to chess pieces on chess boards,” said corresponding author Dr. Chandramallika Basak, associate professor of psychology in the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences. Basak said that this switch helped to determine if the chess players’ memory abilities were domain specific to chess or domain general to a wider range of objects. When changing the identity of the objects, however, but not location, the chess players’ advantage was limited to the chess pieces.