Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Memory for the QWERTY keyboard has been shown to be a good experimental paradigm to test the relationship between explicit and implicit memory as, despite high typing proficiency in young students nowadays, explicit knowledge of the keyboard seems to remain scarce. In our experiment, we investigate the relationship between implicit and explicit keyboard memory by asking participants to find the 21 letters of the Italian alphabet on a blank QWERTY keyboard (explicit task) and then perform a procedural (implicit) task by typing short paragraphs. Results showed significantly lower explicit (compared to implicit) accuracy. To investigate the role of linguistic context in the implicit task, we compared these results with a subset from Experiment 1 in Ianì et al. (2024), who used a single letter procedural task, illustrating a decline in implicit performance between the two experiments. Our findings suggest the importance of linguistic and sensorimotor contextual factors for procedural knowledge.