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Whether you're a hunt-and-peck typist or a Rachmaninoff of the keyboard, you will make mistakes. But it's not just your eyes catching typos when you see them on the screen. Your hands know when you mess up too. That’s according to a study in the journal Science. [Gordon Logan and Matthew Crump, "Cognitive Illusions of Authorship Reveal Hierarchical Error Detection in Skilled Typists"]
Researchers recruited expert typists—college students, of course—and showed them 600 five-letter words, one at a time. And they asked the students to type those words as quickly and accurately as possible. But sometimes, the researchers inserted typos in the word as it appeared on screen, when the students hadn’t made one. Other times they automatically corrected typos the students did make.
And the students tended to believe the screen. So if a typo had been added, they figured they must have messed up. If a typo had been corrected they thought they typed it right. But the hands didn't fall for it. When the fingers slipped up, they paused a split second longer than usual before typing the next letter. But they didn't pause when fake typos appeared on-screen only. So we apparently have two discrete mechanisms guarding against typing errors, one visual, the other tactile. To fox quick brown fixes. To fix quick brown foxes.
—Christopher Intagliata
[The above text is an exact transcript of this podcast.]
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12 Comments
Add CommentWho uses wrong as an adverb?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSigh - archaic.
Nice to know. I think that anyone who types enough probably knew this intuitively. Now I think of it much of the time I find that I'm not really concentrating on what I'm typing - visually. Occasionally, when I'm not looking at the screen or keyboard, my hands have undone and corrected a typo before I got a chance to see it!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIs it your hands that correct the typo?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMuch of what we do is unconscious.
In a like manner is it possible that we correct words before we say them? - so whats really happening is a reflection of our linguistic ability or something innate about our use of language. Possibly a throwover from something we are continuously doing when we write, but our mechanism of writing is slower than typing so that this mechanism of language is revealed.
Maybe all our senses are recruited in our linguistic ability, especially our sense of touch amplifying its synesthetic input when we write - or type. Touch perhaps being slightly slower, in respect of its mechanism of handling data, than vision, might drag behind and mop up any errors in the wake of vision.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt would be interesting to superpose a spoken text or a video of the spoken text and see if the hands can rectify errors given conflicting verbal and visual/verbal narrative. For instance- do your hands see the Mc Gurk effect. When the sound of B appears to be an F when visual context is changed.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLikewise stroop tests. When you type RED in blue - which system do your hands 'see' and type.
Are the correction in typos change by such conflicting sensory and conceptual data.
Sorry that should have said - In stroop tests - which word does your hand type - when they see the word RED in blue etc. - and how do they perform as against your purely verbal report of what you see when presented with conflicting images such as the word RED in blue.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis would give a window into the synesthetic inputs which must have happened during the invention of a written language. And the neural pathways reported by Dehaene et al to be involved in reading. (One might expect those 'exapted' neural pathways to be particularly active in such tests.)
It might allow us to throw some light on whether or not spoken language could have existed long before a written one.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisError detection must be an important componet of such language.
How does your right hand perform verses the left. If your right is controlled by the linguistic side of the brain - is it your left that corrects the errors it makes - as it might uses pattern recognition etc.rather than syntactical relations to identify errors and one could tease out which separate systems are in action here. Or likewise one sense might recognise a different aspect of language than another and point to the plasticity inherent in language which makes it availble to fifferent components within the brain.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt's sad to see Scientific American publish something in such simplistic terms. Your FINGERS cannot "know" anything because they don't have brains. They are simply appendages that are connected to your Central Nervous System via the peripheral nerves. The findings are likely that the cerebellum (the area of the brain that mediates storage of skill-based memory, aka implicit memory) is what is involved here. To say that your "fingers know when you type wrong" is childish and inaccurate, and simply perpetuates the myth of "muscle memory."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTouch typing is typing without using the sense of sight to find the keys. Specifically, a touch typist will know their location on the keyboard through muscle memory. Touch typing typically involves placing the eight fingers in a horizontal row along the middle of the keyboard (the home row) and having them reach for other keys.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOn a standard QWERTY keyboard the home row keys are: "asdfjkl;" Most computer keyboards have a raised dot or bar on either the F/J keys and/or the D/K keys (or the keys in the same position, for non-QWERTY keyboards) which enables blind or partially sighted individuals that touch-type to position their fingertips correctly over the home row, and which incidentally helps sighted touch-typists to orient their fingers as well.
Another interesting question. Were or are our fingers crucial components of language especially during its evolution from a gestural/noise origins to a spoken and then written one?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAre they silent these days until given a pen or keyboard?