William G. Chase investigated how expertise changes perception and human memory. In experiments with Herbert A. Simon, chess players reconstructed briefly viewed positions and copied positions in view. Grouping and recall differed with skill and with the structure of the arrangement.[ref]
Perception in chess by William G. Chase and Herbert A. Simon. Cognitive Psychology 4, 55–81, recall and copying experiments
The expert advantage was especially marked for meaningful chess positions. Random arrangements weakened the value of learned patterns, helping distinguish domain knowledge from a universal increase in immediate storage. The resulting chunking account explains how a player can retain relationships among pieces without encoding every piece as an unrelated item.
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