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Ericsson and Kintsch propose long-term working memory to explain how skilled people handle information demands that exceed the limited temporary capacity of conventional working memory. With extensive domain knowledge and practice, performers encode task information into long-term memory while maintaining retrieval cues in short-term memory.
These cues permit rapid, reliable access to relevant stored information during an ongoing activity. The framework extends skilled-memory theory and is applied to text comprehension and expert performance in domains including mental calculation, chess, and medical diagnosis. Long-term working memory is domain-specific: it depends on acquired knowledge, familiar task structures, meaningful encoding, and retrieval organisations rather than a general expansion of short-term capacity. Access can be disrupted when task conditions prevent use of established cues.
The theory helps explain how experts maintain coherence across complex material and resume interrupted reasoning. Educationally, it suggests that fluent performance grows from organised knowledge and practised retrieval structures, not from training a context-free memory capacity in isolation.
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