Typists who clear 70 wpm can’t even say where the keys are

The majority of typists couldn’t tell you how they type if they tried, according to a study published in October in the scientific journal Attention, Perception, and Pschyophysics. The finding comes from a body of typists who averaged 72 words per minute but could not map more than an average of 15 keys on a QWERTY keyboard.

The basic theory of “automatic learning,” according to Vanderbilt University, asserts that people learn actions for skill-based work consciously and store the details of why and how in their short-term memory. Eventually the why and how of a certain action fades, but the performative action remains.

However, in the case of typing, it appears that we don’t even store the action—that is, we have little to no “explicit knowledge” of the keyboard. In the first experiment conducted, the typists averaging 72 wpm and 94 percent accuracy were given 80 seconds to write letters in the correct places on a QWERTY keyboard. On average, they got 57 percent right and 22.3 percent wrong, and they forgot the rest.