Conveners
Unpacking Digital Dexterity: Cognitive and Sensorimotor Perspectives on Mobile Typing
- Lorenzo Viviani (Dipartimento di Scienze Mediche, Università degli Studi di Ferrara)
As smartphones have become central to everyday digital interaction, typing on touchscreen keyboards has emerged as a compelling entry point for studying human sensorimotor behavior. This theoretical contribution explores the foundations of mobile typing as a motor skill, synthesizing a growing body of interdisciplinary literature that positions it as both a performance task and a behavioral...
From the tap of a thumb on a smartphone screen to the deliberate keystroke on a keyboard, digital writing encompasses a spectrum of sensorimotor behaviors that offer insights into human cognition and motor control. Building upon the understanding of digital interaction, this symposium brings together distinct yet interconnected contributions that investigate how writing unfolds on touchscreen...
In daily life, humans produce complex and subtle hand and finger movements, such as playing instruments or typing on keyboards and touchscreens. Typing on smartphones is common in two main domains: (i) content consumption (e.g., browsing, reading news), and (ii) content generation (e.g., writing messages, posting on social media). Recent findings show that merely observing smartphone typing...
Mobile typing is a widespread activity. Despite its ubiquity, mobile typing has predominantly been examined in controlled, low-ecological settings. The focus has often been limited to conventional metrics such as speed and error rate. The present study adopts a novel methodological approach to investigate behavioral aspects of mobile typing that have received limited attention — specifically,...
Writing is a complex cognitive activity involving both orthographic and motor components.
Over time, these processes have evolved in response to changes in writing media. The dual-route theoretical approach considered that orthographic and motor processes function independently and in a sequential fashion: once spelling retrieval is over motor execution
begins (McCloskey & Rapp, 2017)....
Kinematic analysis of writing movements offers a valuable window into the cognitive and motor processes involved in written language production. Traditionally employed to assess motor fluency, such analysis also provides insights into how linguistic variables—such as lexicality, orthographic complexity, or syllabic structure—affect the timing and dynamics of writing. This presentation focus on...
