The theory of the long-term working memory is a generalization of the theory of the expert memory of Hunting and Ericsson (1981). She was proposed in 1995 by Ericsson and Kintsch (for an assessment of this French theory to see Guida, Tardieu & Nicolas, to appear), she belongs to the theories of activation. It thus makes the assumption that the working memory is the activated part of the long-term memory.

Principle

The general principle of this theory is to consider that part of the long-term memory (MTLT) can be used as working memory when an individual is expert in a field, which allows an increase in storage space during the execution of a task. The organization of knowledge in MTLT would be carried out by the regrouping of concepts from which association results from a long practice (example of the players of failure or musicians). This organized knowledge (called structures of recovery) would also include/understand contextual indices present during the encoding (called indices of recovery). The structures of recovery and their installation vary according to the field of expertise. However they can be gathered in three typologies: structure of recovery (traditional), elaborate structure of memory and episodical structure of text. The first is set up in a deliberated way and is arbitrary (for example during the use of the method of the places), second is close to the diagrams and the last is set up during the reading of a text. In connection with this last typology, Kintsch, Patel and Ericsson (1999) consider that any confirmed reader uses episodical structures of text during the comprehension of a text, provided that the contents of the text are familiar. Guided and Tardieu (2005) proposed a method known as of personalization to handle the familiarity of a text and thus the capacity of an individual to use his MTLT. In the musical field, a characteristic of the theory of the MTLT is in particular to give an account of the capacity which has the expert musicians to hear what they read on the partition. This capacity results from a long practice and would be the consequence of structures of recovery “amodales” of musical knowledge (Drai-Zerbib & Baccino, 2005).

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