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One of the difficult aspects of piano playing for me was learning to move my fingers across the keys at a rapid pace. The technique to playing a fast passage involves finger speed and the overlapping of fingers to move up and down to hit different notes like the gif shown above demonstrates. I was very good at reading the notes but my finger speed was the ability that prevented me from mastering the fast passages of many pieces I attempted to learn. My piano teacher then suggested I practice with a book full of fast finger technique exercises. I found that these exercises were enjoyable and I practiced them often. With a few months of practice, my fingers gained strength, were more adept at fast sixteenth notes and I was able to fly through the exercises. When I went back to play the piece again after my practice, I found that my fingers moved much faster and it was easier for me to learn the finger pattern needed to master the fast passage. This improvement can be attributed to positive transfer. The book exercises helped me learn the motor skill of finger movement and this had a beneficial effect on my performance of the piece.

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This is a picture of me competing in the triple jump during a high school sectional meet. I only started triple jumping junior year of high school but it quickly helped me find my place on the track team. Although I was never an extraordinary triple jumper, I had jumps far enough to make varsity and I became a valuable member on my track team’s triple jump relay team. However, before I could get to this point I had a lot to learn in one season to improve my technique and performance. I can now attribute much of my learning to augmented feedback. This feedback came from an external source, like a coach or teammate, and told me information about my jump performance. Different from a skill like throwing a baseball where it is easy to see where the ball lands, triple jump involves fast movements that make it nearly impossible to watch where your feet land while also focusing forward on landing in the pit. This is why a coach or teammates' feedback on my jumps was necessary for me to learn the skill. The key skill needed to improve my triple jump was being able to maximize the distance of each leap. As a beginner, I needed my coach there after each jump to tell me which leaps I needed to elongate and to tell me where my foot was landing on the board. This feedback was the only way I would know to extend my leg further on the next jump to increase my distance. Without the feedback from my coach or teammate about this information I would never have known that what felt like a big leap was actually a small step. The ability to improve my performance on each phase of the jump led to a huge increase in my jump distance and my performance.

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Usually our show practices consisted of running through the script over and over again but when it came time to practice the lines and songs, our directors would often switch up the way we did it with different run-throughs such as a speed run (saying your lines as fast as you can), a fun run (where you say your line in a different, funny way) and a run where everyone lied on the ground with their head on someone else’s stomach. While these run-throughs were meant to add an entertaining twist on the same lines that we would run through over 100 times, the directors didn’t even realize they were incorporating variability of practice. Practice variability refers to a variety of movements and context characteristics one experiences while practicing a skill. Our run-throughs demonstrated variability of practice because the actors were saying the same lines each time but varied the parameters in which they said them, whether it was faster, in a different voice or while lying down. The variability that these creative run-throughs added to our practices improved the acting of our lines because each actor had to learn how to manipulate their lines in different situations. This forced them to use cognitive effort to say them differently instead of the usual way there were used to. This technique also forced many of us, especially my self, to really step out of our comfort zones in order to say our lines in funny ways. This is why I picked this picture. It depicts how we could not have improved our lines without the variability of practice that forced everyone out of the comfortable way they were used to saying their lines. Not surprisingly, after the speed and fun run-throughs, everyone’s lines saw major improvements. Everyone gained more character, speed and creativity. Without variable practice (and stepping out of our comfort zones), everyone would have never realized how much they could improve the way they said their lines. Needless to say, it took out show from boring to very entertaining.

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I don’t think I really knew the meaning of multi-tasking until I became a waitress for the first time. I soon learned that unless I had items in both hands at all times, I was doing something wrong. I had to constantly think about what each table needed because I soon found it impossible to remember it all at once. The central-resource theory of attention helped explain this because it says we have a central reserve of resources for which all activities compete. Between filling drinks, delivering food, clearing plates and all the little jobs in between, the numerous activities competing for my attention outweighed my capacity to respond to them at once. This cartoon accurately describes how I felt trying to handle all of these demands at once. Inevitably, there were some requests that got pushed outside my capacity and I would simply forget them. This especially applied as I would walk back from taking a tables’ order to the kitchen. While I was trying to remember everything for that table, I would have at least 2 or 3 others tables stop me and ask for something else. Quickly, I reached my attention capacity and by the time I made it to the kitchen, I knew there was some request that I was forgetting but I could not remember what. I was also very nervous my first few weeks on the job. Kahneman’s central resource model of attention says that arousal is a determinant of the available capacity of your resource pool. Therefore, my high stress and nervousness caused increased arousal and further reduced the attention capacity in my resource pool. This only made it harder to remember everything and forgetting items for guests made my stress level increase more. It created a viscous cycle.

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Dancing: Procedural vs Declarative Knowledge

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Dancing: Procedural vs Declarative Knowledge

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Although I never thought I’d find myself dedicating a semester of practice to a hip-hop dance routine, I got to try out the life of a dancer this semester as I joined my sorority’s cast of Humorology, a series of seven 20 minute shows. One slight problem, I had never taken a dance class in my life, but how hard could it really be to learn a dance routine? As a novice, it was evident I relied on declarative memory to recall the dance routine and the trade-off was that I could not perform it accurately at full speed. Each move required my conscious thought about what move came next. If I wanted to successfully do the whole dance, I had to constantly think ahead and prepare my motor movements for the next move. However, as I continued to rehearse the moves over and over again at practice, I lost my declarative memory and it became a part of my procedural memory. If I wanted to recall which move came before a different one, it was not a fact that I could simply recall, I had to act out all the moves up to that point to figure it out. The routine had become procedural knowledge. In our last week of practice as we worked to fine tune the dance movements, formations and in-sync arm movements our director told us all, “just don’t think about it, the more you do, the more you will mess up.” She offered this advice without even knowing that she was referring to the phenomenon of “choking” or trying to use declarative memory once it has been encoded as procedural. I learned this to be true. When I tried to think about my movements, I would mess up. It was evident that the dance was procedural knowledge.