Mistake patterns while learning

Question

About a decade ago, I used to teach programming language in a company specialized in forming new developers. It was common for students to really struggle with very simple coding tasks due to really rookie mistakes unrelated to the technical subject that was being taught. The single most common rookie mistake was when the student simply forgot to save the file before running it. Everything was correct but they just did not hit the save button. And most of these times it required my assistance in solving. I noticed that even more experienced developers enrolled in the classes also made the exact same mistakes and even felt super embarrassed when I spotted the cause.

Today, while studying a new technology, I myself(a 14 years experienced software engineer that used to teach programming languages) made the exact same rookie mistake. It took me 20 minutes of debugging to find out I just forgot to hit the save button. On my day to day activities it does not happen, or if it does I spot it in seconds unless I'm really really tired.

What I mean is, hitting the save button (or cmd + s keyboard shortcut) has become second nature to me even so that sometimes a hit cmd + s on places I shouldn't like while browsing the web. Some devs even have the habit of hitting the button several times. It clearly seems like a second nature to me.

It made me wonder WHY does the human mind, when dealing with a new complex subject, keeps repeating the same mistake patterns unrelated to the matter being studied? Besides that, how does the fact of studying a new subject can affect your 'second nature'?

The human mind truly amazes me.

Answer 1

I think this is mostly a UI/UX problem.

Your brain has a model of the world that you update with new information (something like predictive coding). If nothing in front of you signals that something is unsaved, you can only know whether it has been or not if you have some episodic memory of the situation. Episodic memory is fragmented; we experience too much stuff to remember it all, so most of it is discarded. Events that are emotional or otherwise significant are more likely to be remembered. Pressing a save button, an activity you may do multiple times a day, just isn't that significant. You wouldn't remember where you were the last 10 times you scratched specifically your left eyebrow, either.

The conscious, intentional processing part of your brain is really only dedicated to a few small things that your brain is doing at a time, maybe even just one. You simply can't be attentive to everything your brain is doing at a given moment. It's constantly taking in and filtering information without your awareness. It's maintaining your posture so that you neither fall over in your chair nor have to constantly think "okay I'm leaning to the left a bit, better relax some back muscles and tighten some others". Think of an infant learning to eat: they have trouble even getting the food or utensil to their mouth because they're needing to actively modify the muscle patterns involved in that activity. Similarly, if you've learned to drive, you probably started out by needing to intentionally turn the steering wheel to keep your car within its lane and it would be hard to focus on other things besides staying in that lane, whereas an experienced driver does those tasks effortlessly and instead can focus on looking for unexpected events like a pedestrian moving into the road or participate in a conversation.

Over time, eating, driving, and writing computer code are managed by procedural memory that makes things more automatic. Procedural memory is associated more with the basal ganglia than the neocortex, though it's never quite that simple. Generally, once you learn to do things with procedural memory, those parts of the brain manage the task and the other parts of your brain involved in conscious attention and awareness tune out.

Back to perception and saving... in psychology and neuroscience we talk about the salience of a stimulus; salience is what makes us notice something important and ignore things that are unimportant. If the wrong things are salient, you might have trouble paying attention/focusing (ADHD), focus too much on a stimulus that shouldn't be important (sensory processing disorder/autism), or the brain may even focus on things that aren't really there (e.g., in schizophrenia). If there is nothing in the UI/UX to make it salient that a file is saved or not, there's nothing for your brain to act on. You could try to focus on that cue to make it more salient (sometimes the 'save' icon itself has a different appearance when something is saved versus not), but if you usually save more or less "automatically" as part of your procedural memory pattern for working at the computer, that attempt is usually going to be unneeded and so you won't really learn it.