Monitoring-induced disruption in skilled typewriting.

Abstract

It is often disruptive to attend to the details of one's expert performance. The current work presents four experiments that utilized a monitor to report protocol to evaluate the sufficiency of three accounts of monitoring-induced disruption. The inhibition hypothesis states that disruption results from costs associated with preparing to withhold inappropriate responses. The dual-task hypothesis states that disruption results from maintaining monitored information in working memory. The implicit-explicit hypothesis states that disruption results from explicitly monitoring details of performance that are normally implicit. The findings suggest that all three hypotheses are sufficient to produce disruption, but inhibition and dual-task costs are not necessary. Experiment 1 showed that monitoring to report was disruptive even when there was no requirement to inhibit. Experiment 2 showed that maintaining information in working memory caused some disruption but much less than monitoring to report. Experiment 4 showed that monitoring to inhibit was more disruptive than monitoring to report, suggesting that monitoring is more disruptive when it is combined with other task requirements, such as inhibition.

Watch what you type: The role of visual feedback from the screen and hands in skilled typewriting

“…When typists are required to give explicit error reports and response echoes are absent, the outer loop must monitor keystrokes. Keystrokes are typically executed too rapidly to be monitored explicitly (Keele, 1968;Keele & Posner, 1968;Snyder & Logan, 2013), so the outer loop compensates by slowing the rate at which the inner loop executes keystrokes so that explicit monitoring is possible (Logan & Crump, 2009;Snyder & Logan, 2013;Tapp & Logan, 2011). Thus, IKSI will be longer when response echoes are absent than when they are present.…”

“…This requirement should provide more incentive for the outer loop to modify inner-loop timing (Snyder & Logan, 2013). We used the same discrete typing task as in Experiment 1 but prompted the typists to report whether or not they typed the word correctly after they finished typing each word.…”

“…The outer loop specifies the word that should be typed, and the inner loop identifies and orders the corresponding keystrokes. The outer loop also adjusts the timing parameters within which the inner loop must operate to compensate for atypical typing conditions: For instance, the typing rate can approximate an experimentally manipulated tempo (Yamaguchi & Logan 2014) and can slow to allow enough time to monitor individual keystrokes explicitly (Crump & Logan 2010b;Snyder & Logan, 2013;Tapp & Logan, 2011). The purpose of the present study was to test whether the outer loop will also adjust inner-loop timing parameters to compensate for the absence of visual feedback.…”

“…Many studies have demonstrated dissociations between the two loops (e.g., Abrahamse, Ruitenberg, de Kleine, & Verwey, 2013;Crump & Logan, 2010a, b;Logan & Crump, 2009, 2010Snyder & Logan, 2013;Tapp & Logan, 2011;Verwey, 1999;Yamaguchi & Logan, 2014;Yamaguchi, Logan, & Li 2013b), but few studies have addressed how they work together to control typing (Yamaguchi, Crump, & Logan 2013a). The inner loop is subordinate to the outer loop (Logan & Crump, 2011), so inner-loop processes are subject to outer-loop processes.…”

“…Inner-loop processes are generally implicit. The outer loop operates at the level of words, the inner loop operates at the level of keystrokes (Crump & Logan, 2010a;Snyder & Logan, 2013;Tapp & Logan, 2011). The outer loop harnesses language comprehension and generation processes to produce a series of words, whereas the inner loop codes motor programs (Keele et al, 1990;Miller et al, 1960;Snyder & Logan 2014) to produce a series of keystrokes.…”