(www.interscience.wiley.com) DOI: 10.1002/acp.1102 Transfer of Pattern Recall Skills May Contribute to the Development of Sport Expertise

Superior recall of domain-specific patterns is well established as a defining attribute of expert performers. Recent studies on the developmental histories of expert team ball sport players (e.g. Baker, Côté, & Abernethy, 2003a) also suggest that experts characteristically receive exposure to a wide range of sports in their developing years and that this related sports experience may reduce the amount of sport-specific training needed to become an expert. This study examined whether the facilitation of expertise associated with other sport experience might arise from positive transfer of pattern recall skills from one sport to another. Expert netball, basketball and field hockey players and experienced non-experts performed a recall task for patterns of play derived from each of these sports. Experts from sports different to those shown in the presented pattern consistently out-performed non-experts in their recall of defensive player positions, suggesting some selective transfer of pattern recall skills may indeed be possible. Copyright # 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Compared to the situation 20 years ago, much is now known about the defining characteristics and components of expert sports performers (Starkes, 2003). A significant body of literature has emerged over the past two or more decades comparing the performance of expert, lesser skilled and novice athletes on a range of standard cognitiv