"Allowing the use of (the fingers of) both hands would cause many unforeseen effects on the brain, which would make it hard to interpret the results" so all participants had to "type using the right index finger [only]".
How does one rule out the relevance of those "unforeseen effects" when claiming to compare typing in general vs handwriting in general? The paper only contains that one line about the matter, in the "Participants" section. (also, do Norwegian university students in their early twenties normally write in cursive?)
I think it gets worse
> To prevent artifacts produced by head and eye movements caused by shifting gaze between the screen and the keyboard, typed words did not appear on the screen while the participant was typewriting.
So no only were typists not touch typing, they couldn't see what they were typing.
Too many variables are changed between the two tests.
A) writers can see whole words vs no visual feedback
B) writers use their natural writing technique (2 or 3 fingers?) vs 1.
It'd be interesting to test typing with a single hand (using words that can be entirely touch typed with one hand)
> So no only were typists not touch typing, they couldn't see what they were typing.
This is how I feel as a left hander while writing the old fashioned way. I can’t see what I’m writing so I get sloppy really quickly, and always need paper with lines.
Not that this makes their methodology not totally bunk, of course.
Not disagreeing with your points here in this context, but it's interesting to note that I learned touch typing on a typewriter in school and I know which letters I've missed when typing, and can happily copy pages of text without needing to see the screen - even to correct any errors.
Wow. Junk science indeed. "Unforeseen effects on the brain" so you essentially test in a way that is incomparable to those who are experienced typists?
If you're only using one finger to type, of course you're using less brain activity to control that one finger, versus all ten.
I'm unable to read the actual paper, but from the comments here, it sure seems like they worked backwards from an existing premise ("handwriting is better than typing for retaining information") and found a way to make that "truth".
Edit: Missed the link to the article in the comments. Reading it now.
They give a recommendation for education, but didn't measure retention.
I agree with their premise provided students don't know how to touch type (given the anecdotal amount of visual typing I've seen a reason concern for students) it's also interesting that it's cursive, which is being taught less.
I've heard that in some «almost only words» fields, laptops for students (and projectors for professors) got generalized during lectures (?),
while in math-heavy fields (and I assume, anything involving frequently having to do drawings / schematics), paper for students (and blackboards for professors) were still overwhelmingly used only a few years ago, and I predict are still going to be, until both hardware (e-paper just only barely got colour now !) and software gets much, MUCH better.
I think things like iPads aren't uncommon, at least that's what I was using - but handwriting on an iPad is virtually identical to pen and paper, so no real difference.
> Allowing the use of (the fingers of) both hands would cause many unforeseen effects on the brain, which would make it hard to interpret the results. Participants gave their informed written consent
but is it truly informed consent if it is written with multiple fingers?
I love this with Science. If something would be hard to work with, we just change it until it is easier to measure. That it has no resemblanse with what we were trying to measure is uninteresting.
> How does one rule out the relevance of those "unforeseen effects" when claiming to compare typing in general vs handwriting in general?
Exactly… Most people can after training type much faster than they can write with a pen, assuming they’re allowed to use all fingers, which I’d expect to be crucial when comparing them.
> do Norwegian university students in their early twenties normally write in cursive?
Norwegian here: No. We learned cursive in elementary school but most students switched to “block letters” in secondary school. For the past 15+ years, students have also had school computers since secondary school, so about half of their writing went digital since then. (With somewhat negative results, given the attention span of most teens…)
> when claiming to compare typing in general vs handwriting in general
Yeah, the paper claims "whenever handwriting movements are included as a learning strategy, more of the brain gets stimulated, resulting in the formation of more complex neural network connectivity," which is bunk given the methodology.
But this is not handwriting vs typing. It's handwriting vs. "a weird input method none of the participants had ever used before", namely pecking at the keyboard with one finger of one hand.
I've been taking notes in a text editor since 1994. What I found was that taking notes via computer was much easier because I could finally keep up with what I'm taking notes about (typing is MUCH faster than writing), and could therefore spend more time considering the thing I'm taking notes on, rearrange things, group them, etc using simple keyboard commands.
My impression is that my retention went way up and I had better understanding overall because I could discover the underlying patterns quicker when I was spending less time and energy encoding my thoughts into words.
During college lectures my retention was highest when I didn’t notes at all. I found that if I took notes, most of my brain power went towards capturing the content instead of actively engaging with it.
Once I stopped taking notes, it freed up my mind to think critically about the material and helped me quickly identify when I was confused about something. When I was confused, I was able to ask the professor about it immediately instead of trying to figure it out on my own after the lecture
A middle ground is just to jot down a few words when something is unclear, just enough to let you know what you need to go back and review.
Not all professors want to take questions during lecture, it works fine in small classes but it can be quite disruptive in a large lecture class when you have a sylabus to stick to in a fixed number of lecture meetings.
People often claim that taking notes by hand, because it is slow, forces you to interpret and condense what you are learning into a more compact representation, and therefore understand it better.
That has never been the case for me -- while I'm busy doing that thinking, I missed the last 3 sentences from the lecturer, and then am struggling to catch up, and when I finally figure out what they're explaining again, there's no more time to write it down.
But I can type faster than lecturers speak. And obviously you don't take notes verbatim either, just the gist of a sentence. Then after the seminar is over, I can go over the notes at my own pace to build my understanding. Details that didn't seem that relevant during the seminar, I suddenly realize are key.
I really don't understand why people don't talk about this advantage more.
> People often claim that taking notes by hand, because it is slow, forces you to interpret and condense what you are learning into a more compact representation, and therefore understand it better.
> while I'm busy doing that thinking, I missed the last 3 sentences from the lecturer
That's not the same kind of note-taking. The first is writing for understanding, the second is taking quick notes to avoid missing anything while the lecturer is talking.
When I did my teacher training fifteen or so years ago, we were told that information that was written down by hand was retained for longer than information that was typed. This article seems to correlate with what I was taught.
However, there's no underlying theory to anything in psychology. Psychologists come up with things they call theories, but when you look at them a bit more closely, they're 'just-so stories' that happen to fit some experimental results. The experimental results themselves are shallow correlations between inputs and outputs. Prod the brain in this specific way, and see how it responds. EEG experiments like the one linked only tell us what bits of the brain respond to what stimuli; we don't know what's actually going on in forming a response to that stimulus.
You can point to the ethics protocols by which experimenters are bound to not harm their subjects - these are important and worthy. You can point to the advertising industry's use of psychology to improve its effectiveness, but this is itself a shallow endeavour. As far as improving our understanding the brain as a physical system, the discipline of psychology is much activity with little achievement.
So the study's findings only hold where typewriting means typing "the presented word using the right index finger on the keyboard," i.e. like a pigeon.
It looks like this was done because while handwriting is a unihemispheral activity, typing with both hands is not. But it trashes the results from a practical perspective.
> The experiment comprised a total of 30 trials, where each word appeared in two different conditions, presented in a randomized order. For each trial, participants were instructed to either (a) write in cursive with their right hand the presented word with a digital pen directly on the screen, or (b) type the presented word using the right index finger on the keyboard. Before each trial, the instruction write or type appeared before one of the target words appeared, and the participants were given 25 s to either write by hand or type the word multiple times, separated by a space. EEG data were recorded only during the first 5 s of each trial. To prevent artifacts produced by head and eye movements caused by shifting gaze between the screen and the keyboard, typed words did not appear on the screen while the participant was typewriting. The writings produced by the participants (see Figure 1 for example) were stored for offline analyses.
I wonder what the effect would be when considering:
Yes I would think that it would be difficult to distinguish between brain activity caused by learning a subject and brain activity caused by learning to write cursive.
Interesting! Explains that even though I've used a laptop since 1992 to do school work because of my learning disabilities(Dysgraphia, mid-line problems, poor fine motor control) I still prefer to hand write my notes. Even if I never read them I noticed that just the act of doing them helps me remember things. I might not remember the source but I can remember the act of note taking. I've noticed the same thing with reading as well.
This is why I think AI chatbots have so much potential for education. Every student can have extended dialogue about the topic and really exercise those neurons.
Could a factor be that most people primarily typewrite now so it’s second nature muscle memory but the handwriting task requires just a little extra effort? I didn't see preexisting disposition factored in at all, so I’m curious.
I think it's actually the opposite - most people can't touch type, so they spend more time and concentration trying to type, which means less focus on the actual content. I would think that handwriting is more muscle memory for most people, thus they can focus more on what they're writing, making connections to it, etc.
While, statistically, that may be strictly true across the population, I suspect, in the main, people who are in an educational environment where note taking is a requirement can touch type.
I don't recall meeting anyone in the modern office—irrespective of department or title—in the last 25 years who can't touch type.
Readit News
How does one rule out the relevance of those "unforeseen effects" when claiming to compare typing in general vs handwriting in general? The paper only contains that one line about the matter, in the "Participants" section. (also, do Norwegian university students in their early twenties normally write in cursive?)
So no only were typists not touch typing, they couldn't see what they were typing.
Too many variables are changed between the two tests.
A) writers can see whole words vs no visual feedback B) writers use their natural writing technique (2 or 3 fingers?) vs 1.
It'd be interesting to test typing with a single hand (using words that can be entirely touch typed with one hand)
I'm surprised the choose not to gather that data.
https://repository.lsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2306&...
Is interesting in that it shows the opposite effect: improved recall. It also measured velocity/speed of response. Which shows writing was faster.
Another idea for a test: writing without ink.
This is how I feel as a left hander while writing the old fashioned way. I can’t see what I’m writing so I get sloppy really quickly, and always need paper with lines.
Not that this makes their methodology not totally bunk, of course.
Deleted Comment
If you're only using one finger to type, of course you're using less brain activity to control that one finger, versus all ten.
I'm unable to read the actual paper, but from the comments here, it sure seems like they worked backwards from an existing premise ("handwriting is better than typing for retaining information") and found a way to make that "truth".
Edit: Missed the link to the article in the comments. Reading it now.
I agree with their premise provided students don't know how to touch type (given the anecdotal amount of visual typing I've seen a reason concern for students) it's also interesting that it's cursive, which is being taught less.
I've heard that in some «almost only words» fields, laptops for students (and projectors for professors) got generalized during lectures (?),
while in math-heavy fields (and I assume, anything involving frequently having to do drawings / schematics), paper for students (and blackboards for professors) were still overwhelmingly used only a few years ago, and I predict are still going to be, until both hardware (e-paper just only barely got colour now !) and software gets much, MUCH better.
but is it truly informed consent if it is written with multiple fingers?
Exactly… Most people can after training type much faster than they can write with a pen, assuming they’re allowed to use all fingers, which I’d expect to be crucial when comparing them.
> do Norwegian university students in their early twenties normally write in cursive?
Norwegian here: No. We learned cursive in elementary school but most students switched to “block letters” in secondary school. For the past 15+ years, students have also had school computers since secondary school, so about half of their writing went digital since then. (With somewhat negative results, given the attention span of most teens…)
Yeah, the paper claims "whenever handwriting movements are included as a learning strategy, more of the brain gets stimulated, resulting in the formation of more complex neural network connectivity," which is bunk given the methodology.
Deleted Comment
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1182327/
My impression is that my retention went way up and I had better understanding overall because I could discover the underlying patterns quicker when I was spending less time and energy encoding my thoughts into words.
Once I stopped taking notes, it freed up my mind to think critically about the material and helped me quickly identify when I was confused about something. When I was confused, I was able to ask the professor about it immediately instead of trying to figure it out on my own after the lecture
Not all professors want to take questions during lecture, it works fine in small classes but it can be quite disruptive in a large lecture class when you have a sylabus to stick to in a fixed number of lecture meetings.
Reminds me of the book "Getting Things Done" by David Allen.
He had the idea of a "trusted system" for capturing things.
Instead of anxiously carrying something important in your head, jot it down and get it off your mind.
Maybe not full notes, but maybe get ready to capture insights.
People often claim that taking notes by hand, because it is slow, forces you to interpret and condense what you are learning into a more compact representation, and therefore understand it better.
That has never been the case for me -- while I'm busy doing that thinking, I missed the last 3 sentences from the lecturer, and then am struggling to catch up, and when I finally figure out what they're explaining again, there's no more time to write it down.
But I can type faster than lecturers speak. And obviously you don't take notes verbatim either, just the gist of a sentence. Then after the seminar is over, I can go over the notes at my own pace to build my understanding. Details that didn't seem that relevant during the seminar, I suddenly realize are key.
I really don't understand why people don't talk about this advantage more.
> while I'm busy doing that thinking, I missed the last 3 sentences from the lecturer
That's not the same kind of note-taking. The first is writing for understanding, the second is taking quick notes to avoid missing anything while the lecturer is talking.
However, there's no underlying theory to anything in psychology. Psychologists come up with things they call theories, but when you look at them a bit more closely, they're 'just-so stories' that happen to fit some experimental results. The experimental results themselves are shallow correlations between inputs and outputs. Prod the brain in this specific way, and see how it responds. EEG experiments like the one linked only tell us what bits of the brain respond to what stimuli; we don't know what's actually going on in forming a response to that stimulus.
You can point to the ethics protocols by which experimenters are bound to not harm their subjects - these are important and worthy. You can point to the advertising industry's use of psychology to improve its effectiveness, but this is itself a shallow endeavour. As far as improving our understanding the brain as a physical system, the discipline of psychology is much activity with little achievement.
DOI: doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1219945
It looks like this was done because while handwriting is a unihemispheral activity, typing with both hands is not. But it trashes the results from a practical perspective.
I wonder what the effect would be when considering:
a) proficiency to write in cursive
b) touch typing ability
While, statistically, that may be strictly true across the population, I suspect, in the main, people who are in an educational environment where note taking is a requirement can touch type.
I don't recall meeting anyone in the modern office—irrespective of department or title—in the last 25 years who can't touch type.