{"id":105,"date":"2010-01-07T14:43:07","date_gmt":"2010-01-07T14:43:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/?p=105"},"modified":"2010-01-07T15:14:17","modified_gmt":"2010-01-07T15:14:17","slug":"granularity-of-typing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/?p=105","title":{"rendered":"Granularity of Typing"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>As I have improved my typing skills over the years, I have noticed that I increasingly make errors at the <em>whole word<\/em> level rather than at the wrong-letter or transposed-letter stage. For example, when I try to type the word &#8220;universe&#8221; I frequently find that I have typed the word &#8220;university&#8221; before I realise that I have made an error. &#8220;University&#8221; is a word that I type many times a day; &#8220;universe&#8221;, perhaps once a week or less. This would seem to relate to the idea of &#8220;chunking&#8221; in memory\u001f\u2014instead of controlling each individual letter being typed, instead I am chunking together the typing activity of whole words as &#8220;basic units&#8221;. There is an argument (from Rumelhart and McClelland, <em>Parallel Distributed Processing<\/em>) that when experienced typists type a word like<em> vacuum<\/em>, where the first three letters are all in the left hand, the right hand is moving towards the letter &#8216;u&#8217; before the left hand has finished the &#8220;vac&#8221; part of the word.<\/p>\n<p>Another piece of evidence for this: a colleague of mine has said in an email: &#8220;slip of the fingers:\u00a0Venue for the meeting will be S122A, (*not* S110B)&#8221;. Fingers would have to slip very precisely to type the exact sequence of letters required to type the name of one room rather than another; the slip is at a much earlier stage in the cognitive process! It would be interesting to do a proper study of this kind of mistyping, perhaps this would make a good student project.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As I have improved my typing skills over the years, I have noticed that I increasingly make errors at the whole word level rather than at the wrong-letter or transposed-letter stage. For example, when I try to type the word &#8220;universe&#8221; I frequently find that I have typed the word &#8220;university&#8221; before I realise that [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[5,18],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=105"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":109,"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105\/revisions\/109"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=105"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=105"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=105"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}