Long-term memory facilitates spontaneous memory usage through multiple pathways.

Memories scaffold ongoing cognition and behavior. Surprisingly, when given the "sensorimnemonic" choice between using working memory (WM) and sampling sensory information from the environment, reliance on WM is much lower than expected. Here, we ask how the availability of long-term memory (LTM), alongside WM, changes how participants spontaneously sample sensory information in service of memory encoding, rely on their memory, and coordinate the two.