Editing Spatial memory (section)

===Spatial expertise===
Within the literature, there is evidence that experts in a particular field are able to perform memory tasks in accordance with their skills at an exceptional level.<ref name = "Kalakoski & Saariluoma" /> The level of skill displayed by experts may exceed the limits of the normal capacity of both STM and WM.<ref name = "Kalakoski & Saariluoma" /> Because experts have an enormous amount of prelearned and task-specific knowledge, they may be able to [[Encoding (memory)|encode]] information in a more efficient way.<ref name = "Kalakoski & Saariluoma" />

An interesting study investigating [[Taxicab|taxi]] drivers' memory for streets in [[Helsinki]], [[Finland]], examined the role of prelearned spatial knowledge.<ref name = "Kalakoski & Saariluoma" /> This study compared experts to a control group to determine how this prelearned knowledge in their skill domain allows them to overcome the capacity limitations of STM and WM.<ref name = "Kalakoski & Saariluoma" /> The study used four levels of spatial randomness:
* Route Order – spatially continuous route<ref name = "Kalakoski & Saariluoma" />
* Route Random – spatially continuous list presented randomly<ref name = "Kalakoski & Saariluoma" />
* Map Order – street names forming a straight line on the map, but omitting intermediate streets<ref name = "Kalakoski & Saariluoma" />
* Map Random – streets on map presented in random order<ref name = "Kalakoski & Saariluoma" />

[[File:Cabs.jpg|thumb|Yellow taxi cabs in New York city]]

The results of this study indicate that the taxi drivers' (experts') recall of streets was higher in both the route order condition and the map order condition than in the two random conditions.<ref name = "Kalakoski & Saariluoma" /> This indicates that the experts were able to use their prelearned spatial knowledge to organize the information in such a way that they surpassed STM and WM capacity limitations.<ref name = "Kalakoski & Saariluoma" /> The organization strategy that the drivers employed is known as [[Chunking (psychology)|chunking]].<ref name = "Kalakoski & Saariluoma" /> Additionally, the comments made by the experts during the procedure point towards their use of route knowledge in completing the task.<ref name = "Kalakoski & Saariluoma" /> To ensure that it was in fact spatial information that they were encoding, the researchers also presented lists in alphabetical order and [[Semantics|semantic]] categories.<ref name = "Kalakoski & Saariluoma" /> However, the researchers found that it was in fact spatial information that the experts were chunking, allowing them to surpass the limitations of both visuo-spatial STM and WM.<ref name = "Kalakoski & Saariluoma" />