Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2015, 12(10), 12723-12734; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph121012723
Writing in a Digital World: Self-Correction While Typing in Younger and Older Adults
1
The Department of Management and Economics, The Open University, 1 University Road, 43537 Ra’anana, Israel
2
The Department of Education and Psychology, The Open University, 1 University Road, 43537 Ra’anana, Israel
†
These authors contributed equally to this work.
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Academic Editors: Lori E. James and Meredith Shafto
Received: 28 July 2015 / Revised: 29 September 2015 / Accepted: 30 September 2015 / Published: 13 October 2015
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Aging and Cognition)
Abstract
This study examined how younger and older adults approach simple and complex computerized writing tasks. Nineteen younger adults (age range 21–31, mean age 26.1) and 19 older adults (age range 65–83, mean age 72.1) participated in the study. Typing speed, quantitative measures of outcome and process, and self-corrections were recorded. Younger adults spent a lower share of their time on actual typing, and demonstrated more prevalent use of delete keys than did older adults. Within the older group, there was no correlation between the total time spent on the entire task and the number of corrections, but increased typing speed was related to more errors. The results suggest that the approach to the task was different across age groups, either because of age or because of cohort effects. We discuss the interplay of speed and accuracy with regard to digital writing, and its implications for the design of human-computer interactions. View Full-TextKeywords:
aging; language production; editing; human-computer-interaction
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).
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MDPI and ACS Style
Kalman, Y.M.; Kavé, G.; Umanski, D. Writing in a Digital World: Self-Correction While Typing in Younger and Older Adults. Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2015, 12, 12723-12734.
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