I highly doubt you'll find a 14 year old who swipes at a book... kids very quickly learn context and rules of physics. It's much harder when some screens are touch screens and some are not, however, but I see adults trying to swipe non-touch screens all the time (mall displays, ads, iMacs etc.)
I was constantly running into this during drawing classes in college after having spent countless hours in Photoshop in high school. It’s amazing how firmly the Cmd-Z reflex plants itself as a reaction to making a mistake!
I’ve also caught myself yearning for Cmd-F when hunting for something in large chunks of printed text.
I’m in my mid-thirties, and I have definitely tried to swipe my MacBook Pro screen a few times.
I don’t think it’s an indication of anything troubling. Sometimes you just get lost in what you’re reading and momentarily forget what device you’re using. If anything, I’m glad teens are so absorbed by reading. It was a struggle to get the teens of my generation to read anything!
I remember how when I was a teen and coding a lot inside the Turbo C IDE, it became second nature to press F2 frequently (to save).
Around that time, while working on math homework (on paper), I'd occasionally experience brain farts, where I would think of pressing (not reach for) the F2 key.
FWIW, I have decent handwriting today, and even exchange correspondence with some friends using pen-and-paper.
I do agree that touchscreen usage should be restricted for toddlers.
I have, on more than one occasion, reached down and wiggled my pencil in order to avoid getting a screensaver on the sheet of paper I was working with a couple of minutes ago.
Try being an engineer who works with oscilloscopes and such. Some of them have touch screens with the buttons along the edges of the screen, and some have softkeys so the GUI looks exactly the same, but you press the buttons next to the screen.
I get this with fuel pumps, the screen isn't a touchscreen (in a brand new device in 2017) the "buttons" are just some subtle screen printing on a static panel (capacitive buttons I think), no affordance at all.
So the on-screen text says "touch here" or similar. Took me a while to realise it meant "press inside the screen-printed rectangle in the panel below the screen" ...
I've recently moved from reading mostly actual books to using e-books. Now when reading physical books I sometimes find myself trying to pinch zoom or select text with my finger. I am 40 years old.
I think that's mostly a function of many touch screens not being obvious about being touch screens, and some non-touch screens having interfaces that look like touch.
We have some older machines for getting train tickets and some newer ones. They probably didn't want to scare anybody off, so the interface still looks almost the same. It used to be buttons next to the screen, now it's a touch screen.
Of course you see people trying to touch the old ones. There's no signifier on the new ones (except the lack of buttons) that shows that they're different, so without a bit of thinking you don't know which affordances there are.
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