Competition for Working Memory among Writing Processes

Narrative, descriptive, and persuasive texts were written by college students in longhand or on a word processor. Participants concurrently detected auditory probes cuing them to retrospect about whether they were planning ideas, translating ideas into sentences, or reviewing ideas or text at the moment the probes occurred. Narrative planning and longhand motor execution presumably were heavily practiced, freeing capacity for rapid probe detection. Spare capacity was distributed equally among all 3 processes, judging from probe reaction times, when planning demands were low in the narrative condition. When motor execution demands were low in the longhand condition, however, reviewing benefited more than planning. The results indicate that planning, translating, and reviewing processes in writing compete for a common, general-purpose resource of working memory.