Do you know where your fingers have been? Explicit knowledge of the spatial layout of the keyboard in skilled typists.

Two experiments evaluated skilled typists' ability to report knowledge about the layout of keys on a standard keyboard. In Experiment 1, subjects judged the relative direction of letters on the computer keyboard. One group of subjects was asked to imagine the keyboard, one group was allowed to look at the keyboard, and one group was asked to type the letter pair before judging relative direction. The imagine group had larger angular error and longer response time than both the look and touch groups. In Experiment 2, subjects placed one key relative to another. Again, the imagine group had larger angular error, larger distance error, and longer response time than the other groups. The two experiments suggest that skilled typists have poor explicit knowledge of key locations. The results are interpreted in terms of a model with two hierarchical parts in the system controlling typewriting.