title: Suppressing visual feedback in written composition: Effects on processing demands and coordination of the writing processes creator: Olive, Thierry creator: Piolat, Annie subject: Psycholinguistics subject: Cognitive Psychology subject: Perceptual Cognitive Psychology description: The goal of this experiment was to investigate the role of visual feedback during written composition. Effects of suppression of visual feedback were analysed both on processing demands and on on-line coordination of low-level execution processes and of high-level conceptual and linguistic processes. Writers composed a text and copied it either with or without visual feedback. Processing demands of the writing processes were evaluated with reaction times to secondary auditory probes that were analysed according to whether participants were handwriting (in a composing and a copying tasks) or engaged in high level processes (when pausing in a composing task). Suppression of visual feedback increased reaction times interference (secondary reaction time minus baseline reaction time) during handwriting in the copying task and not during pauses in the composing task. This suggests that suppression of visual feedback affected processing demands of only execution processes and not those of high-level conceptual and linguistic processes. This is confirmed by analysis of quality of the texts produced by participants that were little, if any, affected by the suppression of visual feedback. Results also indicate that the increase in processing demands of execution related to suppression of visual feedback affected on-line coordination of the writing processes. Indeed, when visual feedback was suppressed, reaction time interferences associated to handwriting were not reliable different in the copying task and in the composing task but were significantly different in the composition task, RT interference associated to handwriting being lower in the copying task than in the composition task. When visual feedback was suppressed, writers activated step-by-step execution processes and high-level writing processes, whereas they concurrently activated these writing processes when composing with visual feedback. date: 2002-08 type: Journal (Paginated) type: PeerReviewed format: application/pdf identifier: http://cogprints.org/3247/1/OlivePiolatIJP2002.pdf identifier: Olive, Thierry and Piolat, Annie (2002) Suppressing visual feedback in written composition: Effects on processing demands and coordination of the writing processes. [Journal (Paginated)] relation: http://cogprints.org/3247/