Classical pattern recall tests and the prospective nature of expert performance Adam D. Gorman 1,2 , Bruce Abernethy 2,3 , and Damian Farrow 1,4 1 Movement Science–Skill Acquisition, Australian Institute of Sport, Canberra, ACT, Australia 2 School of Human Movement Studies, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, Australia 3 Institute of Human Performance, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China 4 School of Sport and Exercise Science, Institute of Sport, Exercise and Active Living, Victoria University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia It is well established that experts are particularly adept at recalling and/or recognizing the key features of domain-relevant patterns. We compared the recall performance of expert and novice basketball players when viewing static and moving patterns. A novel method of analysis was used where the accuracy of the participants in recalling player positions was compared to actual player positions both at the final frame of pattern presentation and at 50 successive 40 ms increments thereafter. Experts encoded the locations of the players in both the static and moving patterns significantly further in advance of their actual finishing point than did nonexperts. Experts’ use of an anticipatory encoding process, which was of a magnitude unmatched by nonexperts, suggests that many previous investigations may have underestimated the extent of the expert advantage in pattern recall. Keywords: Pattern recall; Anticipation; Expertise. It has been well established since the work of de Groot (1965) and Chase and Simon (1973) that experts are typically able to recall and/or recognize the key features of domain-specific patterns better than less skilled individuals. De Groot found that after chess players had been briefly presented with a board containing pieces arranged in a typical midgame configuration, the more highly skilled players were better able to correctly recall the locations of the pieces than were the less skilled players, and they did so almost perfectly. Chase and Simon replicated these findings but also showed that when the pieces were randomly posi- tioned on the board, the recall accuracy of the more experienced players reduced to that of a beginner. These findings provided compelling evi- dence to suggest that the experts’ superiority was not due to an enhanced memory capacity but, rather, the experts were believed to be grouping meaningful pieces of information into “chunks”, thereby circumventing the usual restrictions of short-term memory (Chase & Simon, 1973). Since this initial work in chess, the recall para- digm has been used to examine the underlying Correspondence should be addressed to Adam Gorman, Australian Institute of Sport, Movement Science–Skill Acquisition, Leverrier Crescent, Bruce, ACT 2617, Australia. E-mail: adam.gorman@ausport.gov.au The authors wish to thank Colin Macintosh and Chris Barnes for their assistance and the Australian Institute of Sport. # 2012 The Experimental Psychology Society 1151 http://www.psypress.com/qjep http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17470218.2011.644306 THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY 2012, 65 (6), 1151–1160