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The Speed and Accuracy Trade-Off of Handwriting

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The Speed and Accuracy Trade-Off of Handwriting

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Honestly, I think the majority of my college career has been a trade-off between whether I want to spend the time (I don’t usually have) to do something well, or just do something quickly so that I can move onto the next thing. This is representative of Fitt’s Law, which implies that when one performs a task more quickly, one tends to perform that task less accurately. Because of this, we usually ‘trade-off” speed for accuracy so that we perform the task better.

Unfortunately, this is really the story of my life, especially when it comes to reading for Psychology. My Psychology reading comes to about 40-50 pages per week—that is a lot with a 15-credit load, two jobs, and volunteering three times per week. However, I learned very quickly that if I rush through the reading, I take worse notes. Now sure the notes are of lower quality and not as thorough as if I had just taken my time, but in this case, by “worse” I mean illegible. I come from a family cursed with horrific penmanship, it is often referred to as “chicken scratch”. Therefore, in order to benefit from this reading, I have to make sure to slow down and write well so that I can understand my notes when I need to go back and re-read them. Even though it takes a long time, it helps me take more accurate notes and learn the subject matter more accurately.

So, even though at times it may seem like I am writing painfully slow like it is in this GIF below, it looks much better in the end!

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Handwriting Satisfying GIF - Find & Share on GIPHY

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Discover & share this Satisfying GIF with everyone you know. GIPHY is how you search, share, discover, and create GIFs.

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The Next Michelle Kwan: Positive Transfer

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The Next Michelle Kwan: Positive Transfer

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As a college student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, like many others, I have spent many of my Thursday nights over at the ice-skating rink in the Camp Randall Sports Center. The first time I ever went to the rink was my freshman year and I remember it well since it was the first time I had ever gone ice-skating. At first, I was a little nervous to get onto the ice but I was somewhat confident that I could at least keep my balance because I had a lot of experience rollerblading—I assumed that this would help me skate. Because of this, I asked for hockey blades rather than figure skates because the blade is wider and its movement is more similar to that of a rollerblade.

After only a minute or two of adjustment to the new environment and skates, I was up and skating all around the rink. Unfortunately, my roommate had not had rollerblading experience to help prepare her for her first time ice-skating and instead remained glued to wall hardly able to keep herself standing up.

My history with rollerblading had helped prepare me for a similar but new task; this represents a positive transfer of my learning of rollerblading to my learning of ice-skating. According the Identical Elements Theory for why positive transfer occurs, both rollerblading and ice-skating share similar component parts—you move one foot out and to the side and then the other. Both skills require very similar movement patterns, so the components of one skill can easily transfer over to the other. In addition to this idea of movement patterns, both skills are related through elaborated automatisms, which are self-corrections one makes during a movement to aid in the performance of a skill. Both movements require you to keep your center of mass somewhat low and forward to help prevent yourself from falling, and as you push your foot out, you apply a strong, angled pressure to the ground as you spread each leg out.

The GIF below helps to illustrate how accomplished I felt about learning to ice-skate so quickly because of this positive transfer!!

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Cup Stacking My Semantic Memory Away...
I am sure many of you remember when the movie Pitch Perfect came out, though it was by no means an Oscar-worthy film, it was a great chick flick and guilty pleasure for many. One of the most famous scenes included the “Cup Song”. It seems that overnight, everyone wanted to learn how to perform the cup stack sequence while singing the song. As a member of the fan club, I too felt the need to learn how to perform this song.
I practiced it step-by-step for hours, first trying to get down the movement and then learning it well enough that it would become automatic enough for me to sing while moving the cups. I specifically remember being in the hall afterschool and grabbing some plastic cups from the cafeteria to practice. People seemed to know right away what I was doing and wanted to join in. Since I was new to the task, even though I wasn’t very good or fluid at the movements, I knew what I was supposed to do and was able to explain the movements to others really easily. I was still relying on my semantic memory and therefore could easily describe what the person had to do. I taught a lot of people the cup song that week. But, as I became better, it honestly became harder and harder to explain it to other people—the movement had become almost automatic and required very little conscious attention. By this point, I could sing while moving the cups. This is because I was no longer new to the task and relied more on my procedural memory which involves how to make a movement rather than knowing what is in the movement. Due to this, it became much harder for me to explain the sequence to others, and in order to do so, I would have to physically go through the movements myself and explain it to them step-by-step.
The following is a video which demonstrates how this task has become autonomic and moved from my semantic memory into my procedural memory.

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Consolidation: Peanut Butter, and Ice cream, and Scoops…OH MY! 

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Consolidation: Peanut Butter, and Ice cream, and Scoops…OH MY! 

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I have been working as a swim teacher for years and I love it. Besides getting to work with children, one of my favorite parts about it is the different songs and sayings we use to help us teach children certain movements.
Using these little ‘tricks’ helps the students in the swimming class not only learn new movements, but also remember them. Since there are so many parts to each stroke—breathing, kicking, arm movement, body position, etc.—it is important that we break up the parts as best we can so that the student can practice each part better and eventually learn it well enough that the movement transfers over into their long-term memory.
One of the ways we try and do this is by breaking up the front crawl stroke and focus on the arm movements. First, we teach a song to help remind the students to always keep their fingers glued together. The song goes like this, “Peanut butter fingers all stuck together, ha ha ha ha ha, peanut butter fingers all stuck together, ha ha ha ha!” Then we ask the kids if they like ice cream and of course they always say “Yes!” Then we ask them to “scoop up” their favorite ice cream flavor. The words associate with the movement so that the student can picture the movement they should make whenever they hear the word. This is known as imagery. So, the hand becomes the “spoon” and the water becomes the “ice cream”, so every stroke becomes a scoop of ice cream rather than an arm stroke.
All of this helps the student to better understand the meaning of the movements—without these cues, children will often perform the movement worse because they are not exactly sure what you are asking of them and/or forget the movement altogether.
Below is an example video which demonstrates how I would teach such a movement in my class.

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Uploaded by KATHARINE LOOMIS on 2016-12-15.

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For the past 3 ½ years, I have worked as a barista in a coffee shop. As you can imagine, college faculty and students really love their caffeine, which can mean some pretty busy shifts for me. This is actually one of my favorite parts about the job, it keeps me busy and makes the time go by faster. However, there is a limit to how busy I would like it to get.

If there are only a few receipts waiting for me with drink orders, then I can handle it rather well; I can steam milk and also maintain a conversation or still listen in on orders to make sure that new employees are ringing them up correctly. There is not a lot of interference between these tasks because steaming milk has become rather automatic to me. But most of the time, it is much busier than this and often challenging to keep everything running smoothly.

According to various Theories of Attention, our attention capacity is fixed and there is a certain limit. During a rush, it is quite common that I will be making a drink at the espresso machine and explaining the drink-making steps to a new employee, while trying to listen-in on the orders at the register to make sure that people are ringing them up correctly, and simultaneously keep an eye on the people waiting for their drinks to make sure that the number of people matches the number of receipts we have in order to ensure that we have not accidently lost an order. As you can imagine, this requires a great deal of “multi-tasking” and it can really affect the quality of the drink I am making because there is too much interference with all of the incoming stimuli. According to the Central-resource theories, all of these stimuli will complete with each other for my attention and can exceed my capacity—which may result in me making a Caffeinated Mocha, rather than a Decaf White Chocolate Mocha. Furthermore, because of this limited capacity, I may have to filter the incoming stimuli and select to respond to only one and process it all the way through while the other stimuli wait to be processed—this coincides with the Filter/Bottleneck Theory of Attention. So, in order to make sure that I make the drink correctly, I may have to block out the people around me and only focus on making the drink. Only after completing this task can I address one of the other stimuli.

Therefore, I chose this GIF because I feel like it helps to illustrate how overwhelming it can be to work during a rush.