Cognitive psychology and brain issues

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jacob
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Cognitive psychology and brain issues

Post by jacob »

When I was 19 I was quite interested in cognitive psychology---as I imagine most teenagers would be ;-P

One book said that issues like typing "the the"(*) instead of "the" and similar slip-ups [of similarly sounding words] were quite common. At the time---when I was still watching my fingers while typing or maybe being younger---I had never experienced it or heard of it, but now I see and do it often. Somehow, my brain tells my spinal chord what to write and so it does it but not perfectly. Anyone else notice it? As a function of age? A function of typing speed?

(*) If you're fortunate enough to own one of the early copies of the ERE book, you'll see "the the" appear in the very first pages. Not only is it easily typed. It's also hard to detect while editing.

lilacorchid
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Re: Cognitive psychology and brain issues

Post by lilacorchid »

I can't decide if it is age or just having more of a connection between my brain and fingers. I will make mistakes when typing out things too. Usually I have already thought the sentence out and sent the command to my fingers and the mistake will be whatever my mind is wandering to while my fingers catch up to my brain.

I took typing formally in junior high and was terrible at it. It was in my teens on pIRCh and then later MSN that really got my typing speed up, but only when I'm thinking things. I'm comparatively slow if I'm typing out something handwritten.

jacob
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Re: Cognitive psychology and brain issues

Post by jacob »

FWIW, I type at 70-80 WPM which is pretty normal for someone who spends a lot of time on a computer but hasn't trained in the ten-finger system. (I type using about 4-6 random fingers w/o looking).

Dragline
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Re: Cognitive psychology and brain issues

Post by Dragline »

The faster I type, the more mistakes I make. But I usually just misspell words as different words or omit words, not repeat them.

Chad
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Re: Cognitive psychology and brain issues

Post by Chad »

I type using the ten finger system, but I don't think I repeat often. I do sometimes remove the first letter of the next word I'm typing if the previous word ends in the same letter.

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Re: Cognitive psychology and brain issues

Post by jennypenny »

@jacob--Why didn't you ever learn to type with all 10 fingers? Seems kinda inefficient. ;)

It was explained to me that after we get past typing letter by letter, how we read affects how we type, and specifically, compose while we type. You're retyping words that connect phrases, so you must pause between phrases as you read. Maybe it has to do with your native language?

I'm a bit of a speed reader, and how I read is definitely how I compose at the keyboard. Like Dragline, I omit words (mostly prepositions and "that" or "which"). When I'm copying or recording, I don't make those mistakes, and I'm pretty fast. I haven't timed myself in years, but I can record almost anyone's speech in real time with very few errors (a normal speaking rate is usually 150-180 words/minute). I'm not as fast when composing at the keyboard but I often have to pause and wait for the prompt to catch up.

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Re: Cognitive psychology and brain issues

Post by Chad »

jennypenny wrote:I'm not as fast when composing at the keyboard but I often have to pause and wait for the prompt to catch up.
Are you using a Commodore 64?

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Re: Cognitive psychology and brain issues

Post by jennypenny »

Chad wrote:Are you using a Commodore 64?
:lol:

I'm pretty fast. It's kind of a stupid human trick of mine.

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Re: Cognitive psychology and brain issues

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

I must type right out of my speech center because I constantly make homophone errors. I also fail cognitive tests which require attention to detail such as the exercise of counting how many times the letter "w" occurs in a paragraph. As a book scout I rely on my ability to scan information very quickly and intuitively. Funny thing is that my daughter, during the course of a recent gig doing contract work for a company that does contract work for Google, recently set the human world speed record for scanning documents and my son, who is a bit of a self-taught expert in the field of linguistics with a tendency towards OCD, will not write a sentence without first visually inspecting it for perfection in his head. He was also a spelling bee champ in his youth. So, I think whether you mostly hear or see words in your mind is a definite factor.

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Re: Cognitive psychology and brain issues

Post by jacob »

@jp - Same reason I haven't switched from qwerty to dvorak. It requires an upfront investment and a loss of efficiency while retraining.

I read fast mostly scanning word constellations, e.g. I will read a sentence in, say, three blocks of words. I will read paragraphs by looking at blocks of sentences.

For me, writing mainly involves composing a linear sentence out of such concepts and then feeding it to my hands. Since I type "slow", this means means that the pipeline gets buffered---meanwhile I'm trying to keep the coherence of the total thought from breaking down. This is why nobody are allowed to talk to me under any circumstance while I'm typing. Incidentally, I have the same problem [to a much smaller degree] while talking.

I rarely think, talk, or write in my native language.

PS: Normal conversation speed is about 100 wpm. Normal lecture/monologue speed is about 120 wpm. An auctioneer can get close to 200 wpm.

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Re: Cognitive psychology and brain issues

Post by jennypenny »

jacob wrote:For me, writing mainly involves composing a linear sentence out of such concepts and then feeding it to my hands. Since I type "slow", this means means that the pipeline gets buffered---meanwhile I'm trying to keep the coherence of the total thought from breaking down. This is why nobody are allowed to talk to me under any circumstance while I'm typing. Incidentally, I have the same problem [to a much smaller degree] while talking.
Yeah, that's why you're typing doubles--you're losing your place in your train of thought while you wait for your hands to catch up.


From my speech coach: (not that it really matters, just another data point)
Slow speech is usually regarded as less than 110 wpm, or words per minute.
Conversational speech generally falls between 120 wpm at the slow end, to 150 - 200 wpm in the fast range.
People who read books for radio or podcasts are often asked to speak at 150-160 wpm.
Auctioneers or commentators who practice speed speech are usually in the 250 to 400 wpm range.

TEDtalks average @160 words per minute, and I find them on the slow side sometimes.

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Re: Cognitive psychology and brain issues

Post by jacob »

@jp - Yeah, you're right. I wonder where I got my WPM table from?! Incidentally, I'm also too impatient for talks, TV (unless I'm zonked in which case staring at a wall would be just as satisfying), audiobooks, and podcasts (unless I'm in them ;-P ) because the bandwidth is too low.

PS: You switch(*) try experimenting with a dvorak setup.
PPS: I once listened to a 45 min lecture which I clocked to 60 WPM. That was exceedingly painful! Guy must not have had a lot of material.

(*) That's actually what I initially typed instead of should. They are somewhat homophonic and the meaning is somewhat preserved. Weird, huh?

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jennypenny
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Re: Cognitive psychology and brain issues

Post by jennypenny »

Personally, I think syllables per minute is a better judge. Broadcasters can hit 200 wpm because they speak in one- and two-syllable words. There's usually a slight pause before using a multi-syllable word (almost like "brace yourself, I'm about to use a big word" :lol: ). TEDtalks are similar. Most of their speakers stick to user-friendly hipster language, and are coached to vary their delivery speed instead of interjecting more difficult language.

You would probably find someone speaking at a 150 wpm rate, but topping out at 230+ spm engaging.

JamesR
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Re: Cognitive psychology and brain issues

Post by JamesR »

I watch movies at 1.5x speed. Lectures I watch at 1.25x speed. Super helpful. Youtube has the option for different speeds in the setting (depends on the video). This is the biggest thing that I miss in netflix!

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Re: Cognitive psychology and brain issues

Post by Devil's Advocate »

jacob wrote: issues like typing "the the"(*) instead of "the" and similar slip-ups [of similarly sounding words] were quite common. At the time---when I was still watching my fingers while typing or maybe being younger---I had never experienced it or heard of it, but now I see and do it often. Somehow, my brain tells my spinal chord what to write and so it does it but not perfectly. Anyone else notice it? As a function of age? A function of typing speed?
Not a function of age. Quite definitely a function of typing speed.

I myself learnt typing when I was 14. On those clackety clack machines that today can’t be seen outside of pictures and movies : you know, a real typewriter. I ended up with a typing speed of a shade over 50 WPM, on that now-antique Remington.

Naturally one types much much faster on a computer. I’d once tested it, many years back, and it was around 110 WPM. Not too bad, huh?

I wasn’t aware of the numbers that are mentioned on this thread, about the speed at which we speak. It seems, going by what you people say, that the speed at which I type (which I suppose would be normal for those who’ve learnt how) isn’t much slower than the rate at which most people speak.

Although Jacob’s 70-80 WPM sounds impressive too, given that it’s without training. Would anyone know what the average rate would be be, for regular typists (which is everyone, these days) without training? Or with training, for that matter, on computers? (I remember the average for manual typewriters would be in the range of 40 to 50 for non-typists, while those who typed regularly would sometimes boast of 60-ish words.)

Of course, there are qualifications to my speed-typing :

1. How you measured typing speed back when I was learning this was by taking a word as five characters, spaces and punctuation included. I have no idea how you measure the speed of speech, but counting characters or letters of the alphabet won’t make sense there. So perhaps one uses actual words there : and unless one is a ten-year-old, or speaking to ten-year-olds, the average size of words one uses will probably be larger than that. So that should temper the measure of my 110 WPM typing speed (when compared with how fast one speaks).

2. Also, to arrive at your typing speed, you’re supposed to deduct your errors from the count, I forget how exactly, but using some formula that hugely penalizes any errors you made. Not just a simple subtraction—which stands to reason, since no one wants shoddily typed pieces, no matter how quickly done. So when I say I typed ~50 WPM on a Remington, that’s 50 correctly-typed words (and spaces etc) per minute. My 110 WPM on a computer, on the other hand, comes with errors. Not too many, and that level of errors you may let be if you wish without correcting (although I as a rule don’t) : but definitely it does come with errors. (Now that I think about this, perhaps it is the fact that errors are so easy to correct that is the main reason why typing on a computer is so much easier and faster than on a manual typewriter. Also, the keys were stiffer on the manual machines, and you needed to forcibly clack! the key down hard to get th e letter to register)

What I myself do, to take care of these errors, is make a quick proof-read an automatic part of any typing I do. It doesn’t take long at all, hardly a minute or so per typed page (at a guess), since you have software that marks possible errors with those red and green squiggles (most of which you ignore, but it lets you totally forget about the unmarked text). This may not matter all that much if you type with one finger : but if you’re typing fast, then a brief proof-read becomes more or less necessary.

So that takes away from the typing speed of us trained speed-typists (unless the non-trained people also makes lots of errors, and need to proof-read a bit to leave their typing intelligible—in which case the two will cancel out).

Incidentally : I myself never, NEVER, N-E-V-E-R keep the auto-correct function turned on. Probably no one does anyway : but certainly I’d say, DON’T when you’re speed-typing. Auto-correct does really weird things to what you speed-type, and what’s more those auto-“corrections” aren’t highlighted by spell/grammar-check, and thus you don’t notice them unless you re-read everything very minutely and carefully (which generally you never do, not with everyday stuff).



As for the errors themselves?

In my case they come in all shapes and sizes. There are repeated words (“the the”, “and and”, or perhaps “repeated repeated”) ; sometimes missing words ; then there are errors in spelling ; and there also are weird errors, including phonetic errors (where you type “know” for “no”, that sort of thing). And sometimes, especially if you’re distracted, you notice mistakes that looks Freudian-ish : these can be entertaining.

And no, I don’t think the number of these errors increases with age. At least it hasn’t for me, not thus far.

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Re: Cognitive psychology and brain issues

Post by luxagraf »

I do the double "the" thing all the time and I always have. For me it's definitely related to speed and how far my fingers are behind my brain. Usually "the the" is a sign I just caught up to myself and forgot where I was going next.

I also do teh all the time, which usually autocorrects (it just did in Chrome). The double the is common enough that quite a few text editors and word processors look for it when you turn on spell checking (I know does vim does, so does openoffice).

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Re: Cognitive psychology and brain issues

Post by Tyler9000 »

I'm not the best typist -- mostly 4-finger work where I need to keep my hands in my field of view even if I'm not focusing on every letter.

I do the double words (like "the the") all the time. What always gets me is not that I type them, but that I habitually proofread my work and still miss them after the fact.

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Re: Cognitive psychology and brain issues

Post by Devil's Advocate »

It seems to me that given how each and every one spends so much of our time typing, it makes no sense for people today to not learn typing.

I don’t know what average typing speeds are for the one-fingered and four-fingered and six-fingured, but say you’re at 60 words. You invest in a month’s training, or two perhaps, and you end up doubling it, more or less. You’ll break even in just a few months (in terms of time invested), and then it’s all free money.

Of course, if like Jacob you already do around 80 without training, then your incremental gain in speed won’t be all that much. Unless that higher speed you started out with is a function of some kind of inherent talent or something, which would mean that you may, with training, be able to get to speeds much higher than my 110ish.

JamesR
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Re: Cognitive psychology and brain issues

Post by JamesR »

Here's a potential income-producing hobby.. learn to type fast with steno.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wpv-Qb-dB6g

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