According to Ericsson and Kintsch, what is the name of the activated portion of long-term memory used during problem-solving and reasoning?

• A. Short-term memory
• B. Working memory
• C. Long term working memory
• D. Procedural memory

Answer: (C)

Long-term working memory is the activated portion of long-term memory that you bring into your immediate problem-solving and reasoning process. In Ericsson and Kintsch’s view, when you tackle a complex task, you don’t start from scratch each time. You retrieve relevant knowledge, patterns, and schemas stored in long-term memory and keep them in a readily accessible workspace so you can manipulate them, combine them, and apply them quickly as you work through the problem. This makes expert reasoning efficient, because much of what you need isn’t held anew in the moment but is activated from a vast store and used directly in the current thinking process. Short-term memory is just the temporary hold for current items, long-term memory is the store, and procedural memory covers how to perform tasks, not the active reasoning workspace.