How experts' adaptations to representative task demands account for the expertise effect in memory recall: Comment on Vicente and Wang (1998)

K. A. Ericsson and W. Kintsch's (1995) theoretical framework of long-term w orking memory (LTWM) accounts for how experts acquire encoding and retrieva l mechanisms to adapt to real-time demands of working memory during represe ntative interactions with their natural environments. The transfer of the s ame LTWM mechanisms is shown to account for the expertise effect in unrepre sentative "contrived" memory tests. Therefore, K. J. Vicente and J. H. Wang 's (1998) critique of the generalizability of the LTWM framework is rejecte d. Their proposed refutation of LTWM accounts is found to be based on misre presented facts. The process-based framework of LTWM is shown to be superio r to their product theory because it can explain interactions of the expert ise effect in "contrived" recall under several testing conditions differing in presentation rate, instructions, and memory procedures.