The majority of typists couldn’t tell you how they type if they tried, according to a study published in October in the scientific journal Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics. The finding comes from a body of typists who averaged 72 words per minute but could not map more than an average of 15 keys on a QWERTY keyboard.

The basic theory of “automatic learning,” according to Vanderbilt University, asserts that people learn actions for skill-based work consciously and store the details of why and how in their short-term memory. Eventually the why and how of a certain action fades, but the performative action remains.

However, in the case of typing, it appears that we don’t even store the action—that is, we have little to no “explicit knowledge” of the keyboard. In the first experiment conducted, the typists averaging 72 wpm and 94 percent accuracy were given 80 seconds to write letters in the correct places on a QWERTY keyboard. On average, they got 57 percent right and 22.3 percent wrong, and they forgot the rest.

In a second experiment, the researchers showed participants a simulation in which a key on a blank keyboard would be highlighted, and the participant would have to name which letter it was. Participants hardly performed better at this test, getting the keys right only around 55 percent of the time on the first try. Participants who were allowed to mime typing on the picture where the key was did slightly better, with just over 65 percent on the first try.

Typing is a learned skill, like many learned skills, for which the details are forgotten. But the authors compare it less to playing chess than spending money: you don’t need to know which way the head on the coin faces, just the particular sizes and shapes. That something as integral to typing as the location of the keys is a forgettable detail is surprising, if consistent with the idea that daily exposure to something and explicit knowledge of that thing don’t go hand in hand.

DOI: 10.3758/s13414-013-0548-4, Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics.