Memory experts: Visual Learning, wine tasting, orienteering and speech-reading.

In a large scale memory survey of people's belief about human memory one of the question asked was whether memory capacity could be improved by training like the strengthening of muscles by physical exercise. More than 90% of the respondents believed that memory can be trained. What does memory research tell us? In this chapter we discuss some areas of research relevant to the question of memory expertise that have not been widely discussed within this context. The research selected reflect the interest of the authors, and illustrates that expertise involves modifications at several levels of information processing, from the very specific superiority of basic perceptual discriminations to higher level visuospatial expertise of a more general nature, or permanent perceptual cognitive skills that involve language semantic knowledge. This will give us a broader perspective on expertise and enable us both to examine how different domain expertise produce specific outcomes and to answer some general questions.