You’re driving and after several miles
you question if you even braked for that stop sign behind you. You tie
your shoes without needing to remember the bunny ears rhyme. You drum on
your keyboard for hours a day and don’t even think about the keys that
you’re hitting.
It’s all subconscious, seemingly second-nature at this point.
A
new study from Vanderbilt University psychologists found that, in cases
like these, people really might not know what they’re doing.
Studying
the actions and knowledge of skilled typists, the researchers found
many typists didn’t know the position of keys on the QWERTY keyboard,
and novice typists who were just learning to type properly didn’t seem
to be learning the actual key locations at all either.
Photo credit: Shutterstock
“This demonstrates that we’re capable of doing extremely complicated things without knowing explicitly what we are doing,” said Vanderbilt University graduate student Kristy Snyder, the first author of the study.
Snyder
tested the typing skills of 100 people, finding the average person
typed 72 words per minute and achieved 94 percent accuracy on the blank
keyboard they used. But when asked to fill in the correct letter
placement on a blank QWERTY keyboard, the average person only got 15
letters correct.
The phenomenon of
performing an action without conscious thought is known as automatism.
The phenomenon was previously known, but it was widely believed the
actions became unconscious after being consciously learned. Snyder’s
study with typing shows that, in a way, the keyboard was likely never
memorized.
“It appears that not only
don’t we know much about what we are doing but we can’t know it because
we don’t consciously learn how to do it in the first place,” said
Gordon Logan, Snyder’s adviser who supervised the study.
“Their
fingers know where the keys are but they have no explicit knowledge of
it. Their conscious awareness is pretty hazy,” Logan said in a video
about the research.
According the study news release, the researchers believe this phenomenon might occur because of how widespread computer and keyboard use has become.
The research was published in the journal Attention, Perception & Psychophysics.
Source: theblaze