Jove
Visualize
Contact Us
JoVE
x logofacebook logolinkedin logoyoutube logo
ABOUT JoVE
OverviewLeadershipBlogJoVE Help Center
AUTHORS
Publishing ProcessEditorial BoardScope & PoliciesPeer ReviewFAQSubmit
LIBRARIANS
TestimonialsSubscriptionsAccessResourcesLibrary Advisory BoardFAQ
RESEARCH
JoVE JournalMethods CollectionsJoVE Encyclopedia of ExperimentsArchive
EDUCATION
JoVE CoreJoVE BusinessJoVE Science EducationJoVE Lab ManualFaculty Resource CenterFaculty Site
Terms & Conditions of Use
Privacy Policy
Policies

Related Experiment Videos

Automatic keypress activation in skilled typing.

Martina Rieger1, Martina Rieger

  • 1Cognition and Action, Max Planck Institute for Psychological Research, Munich, Germany. rieger@psy.mpg.de

Journal of Experimental Psychology. Human Perception and Performance
|May 27, 2004
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Related Concept Videos

You might also read

Related Articles

Articles linked to this work by shared authors, journal, and citation graph.

Sort by
Same author

A German translation and adaptation of the knowledge hiding scale.

Frontiers in psychology·2026
Same author

No motor learning during action-imagery practice and no intermanual transfer in the two-ball-rotation task.

Journal of sports sciences·2026
Same author

Age(ncy) differences: Age-related changes in the use of sense of agency cues.

Consciousness and cognition·2026
Same author

The contribution of motor identity prediction to temporal binding.

Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance·2025
Same author

Improvement by imagining actions: Bimanual transfer effects after action imagery practice in a sequential reaction time task.

Acta psychologica·2024
Same author

When time does not matter: cultures differ in their use of temporal cues to infer agency over action effects.

Psychological research·2024
Same journal

Human thermal sensitivity drifts at extreme temperatures.

Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance·2026
Same journal

Dynamic competition between selective attention and spatial prediction during visual search.

Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance·2026
Same journal

Encapsulation of the visual perception of social events from semantic priming.

Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance·2026
Same journal

Biasmapping: Idiosyncratic covert search in the vicinity of fixation.

Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance·2026
Same journal

What are you still waiting for? Fricative recognition shows encapsulated processing and is partially predicted by secondary cue reliance.

Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance·2026
Same journal

Eye movements reveal that drivers can predict the location of hazards in dynamic road scenes but gaze and awareness are dissociable.

Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance·2026
See all related articles

Skilled typists automatically activate keypresses when seeing letters, unlike novices. This automatic activation involves movement characteristics and is influenced by effector and spatial representations, contributing to typing proficiency.

Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Psychology
  • Motor Control
  • Human-Computer Interaction

Background:

  • Skilled typing is often assumed to involve automatic letter-to-keypress activation.
  • Understanding the nature and extent of these automatic processes is crucial for explaining typing expertise.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate whether letters automatically activate corresponding keypresses in skilled typists.
  • To explore the characteristics of this automatic activation, including movement and spatial representations.
  • To determine the role of motor skill proficiency in these automatic processes.

Main Methods:

  • Participants responded to letter colors under congruent and incongruent conditions.
  • Experiments manipulated response setups, including external devices and keyboards, with crossed and uncrossed hands.

Related Experiment Videos

  • Behavioral responses were measured to assess congruency effects.

    • Main Results:

    • Skilled typists exhibited a significant congruency effect, indicating automatic activation.
    • Unskilled participants did not show this effect.
    • Automatic activation included movement characteristics and was modulated by effector-dependent and spatial representations depending on the response device.

    Conclusions:

    • Motor skill proficiency, such as in skilled typing, is associated with automatic activation processes.
    • These automatic activations likely contribute to the high performance levels observed in expert typists.
    • The findings highlight the interplay between automaticity, motor skill, and representational formats in skilled performance.