Pushing Typists Back on the Learning Curve: Memory Chunking in the Hierarchical Control of Skilled Typewriting

Hierarchical control of skilled performance depends on the ability of higher-level control to process several lower-level units as a single chunk. The present study investigated the development of hierarchical control of skilled typewriting, focusing on the process of memory chunking. In the first three experiments, skilled typists typed words or nonwords under concurrent memory load. Memory chunks developed and consolidated into long-term memory when the same typing materials were repeated in six consecutive trials, but chunks did not develop when repetitions were spaced. However, when concurrent memory load was removed during training, memory chunks developed more efficiently with longer lags between repetitions than shorter lags. From these results, it is proposed that memory chunking requires two representations of the same letter string to be maintained simultaneously in short-term memory, one representation from the current trial and the other from an earlier trial that is either retained from the immediately preceding trial or retrieved from long-term memory (i.e., study state retrieval).