In general, the limits imposed by working memory can be overcome by the use of more time-consuming strategies. Therefore, although performance might improve if working memory were larger, it might also improve if subjects simply thought more.
Baron, Thinking and Deciding
I think that all this time, human beings have been watched by creatures whose perceptions and understanding have been so far in advance of anything we have been able to accept, because of our vanity, that we would be appalled if we were able to know, would be humiliated. We have been living with them as blundering, blind, callous, cruel murderers and torturers, and they have watched and known us. And this is the reason we refuse to acknowledge the intelligence of the creatures that surround us: the shock to our amour propre would be too much, the judgement we would have to make on ourselves too horrible: it is exactly the same process that can make someone go on and on committing a crime, or a cruelty, knowing it: the stopping and having to see what has been done would be too painful, one cannot face it.
-- Doris Lessing, Memoirs of a Survivor
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One of the major symptoms of my stroke was seriously truncated working memory, and I spent months both training it back and learning to work around the limitations of it.
So i agree that there are strategies that can overcome the limits of working memory,though I wouldn't describe them as "thinking more"... it was more like saving state externally on a regular basis, and developing useful habits of interacting with that saved state. More generally, it's not a question of doing the same thing for longer, it's a question of doing different things that end up taking longer. It's "thinking differently, for longer."
That being said, though, I cannot begin to describe how much smarter I felt (and seemed) when the damage began to heal and I could start doing stuff in my head again.
It's a bit unclear without the context, but what he means is that subjects should think more about the task and realize that they need to, e.g. use a pen and paper.