Performance on a five-finger chord keyboard

Abstract

Discrimination Reaction Times (DRTs) were examined for each of the 31 chords possible with a 5-finger keyboard. Each of 4 paid Ss showed marked improvement in performance over 4000 to 11,000 DRTs on the 31-chord task despite extensive prior practice on subsets of the 31 chords. DRTs between .30 and .35 sec. were obtained for the average of all 31 chords. Information transmitted from stimulus to keyboard was greater than 4.25 bits. In terms of average DRTs, the relative difficulties of the 31 chords were very similar for the 4 Ss. The percentage of error for each of the chords was highly correlated with the DRTs. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)