Hierarchical Control and Skilled Typing: Evidence for Word-Level Control over the Execution of Individual Keystrokes

• Published in: Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition Vol. 36; no. 6; pp. 1369 - 1380
• Main Authors: Crump, Matthew J. C, Logan, Gordon D
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States American Psychological Association 01.11.2010
• Subjects: Acoustic Stimulation - methods; Analysis of Variance; Auditory Perception; College Students; Evidence; Executive Function - physiology; Experiments; Female; Fingers - physiology; Humans; Male; Office Occupations; Pattern Recognition, Visual; Phonemes; Photic Stimulation - methods; Psychomotor Performance - physiology; Psychomotor Skills; Reaction Time - physiology; Reading; Signal Detection, Psychological; Statistical Analysis; Stimuli; Students; Tennessee; Visual Perception; Vocabulary; Tennessee
• ISSN: 0278-7393; 1939-1285
• DOI: 10.1037/a0020696

Routine actions are commonly assumed to be controlled by hierarchically organized processes and representations. In the domain of typing theories, word-level information is assumed to activate the constituent keystrokes required to type each letter in a word. We tested this assumption directly using a novel single-letter probe technique. Subjects were primed with a visual or auditory word or a visually presented random consonant string and then probed to type a single letter from the prime or another randomly selected letter. Relative to randomly selected letters, probe responses were speeded for first, middle, and last letters contained in visual and auditory word primes but not for middle and last letters contained in random consonant primes. This suggests that word-level information causes parallel activation of constituent keystrokes, consistent with hierarchical processing. The role of hierarchical processing in typing and routine action is discussed. (Contains 4 tables and 4 figures.)