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Now that I am able to dance slightly better than when I first began, it is my turn to help teach the younger generation of dancers this process, and it all begins with my siblings. I would like to think that I am a better dancer than them and can still teach them how to move, instead of them teaching me how to move. To do this I needed to be able to have the moves down first then be able to describe to them how exactly they move in the intense way I do or even go from one move to the next. This was no simple task as I had to use each of the processes associated with memory in order to prevent my siblings from going through the phase I did as a beginner.

The memory storing process is separated into 3 distinct parts with their own function. They are encoding, storage and retrieval. The storage process is where the information that has recently been encoded is now stored somewhere in your brain to be retrieved later. This storage stage can be broken down into procedural and declarative memories. Procedural memory is considered to be the “ability to do” memory which is unconscious but makes up the fact that I know the process of how to. Declarative memory is the “what to do” memory that allows me to verbally explain how to dance to someone else. This memory system can further be broken down into semantic memory, the memory that includes general knowledge about the world, and episodic memory, that includes information about specific events, such as my first dance. My task was to find a way to teach my siblings how to dance through the use of these different memory systems. My procedural memory certainly was useful but it is also unconscious so I could not verbally give my knowledge of how to perform the skill as much as I could give facts of the dance I was trying to teach using my declarative memory. What did help me though was my use of explicit and implicit memory. Using explicit memory allows you to consciously remember information while implicit memory allows you to show that you know some information. This combination of telling my siblings how to dance, using my explicit memory, and showing them with my own body, using my implicit memory, allowed me to get most of my message across throughout their dance training period.

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Part I:  The Beginning of my Dancing Journey

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Part I:  The Beginning of my Dancing Journey

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When I first began to learn how to dance during my childhood, I’ll be honest, it was a mess. I can’t say that I’m a complete professional now but I did improve nevertheless. I couldn’t seem to figure out how exactly to move my body in the correct ways or when to put my body in different positions and this resulted in me having to sit through many dances at family parties and school functions. Luckily for me this is not how the story ends. After many embarrassing moments at parties, many solo dance practices at home, and some occasional dance video analysis, I was able to improve my dancing to the level of being able to dance in front of other people at a party. Throughout my dancing journey I could see how I progressed from one stage to the next in a way that would have even made Fitts and Posner proud.

Fitts and Posner developed a 3 stage model for motor learning that differentiates what kind of information is relevant during each stage and how performance changes. The first stage is called the Cognitive stage and is based on mostly cognitive and verbal processes. In my example, this is the first initial stage where I began thinking about how people do what they do or planning how to connect moves together to form a fluid movement. Through this information, I was able to determine strategies that worked well and even improved significantly at times but I also often had inconsistent performances. The second, Associative, stage consisted of establishing a motor pattern. I began to figure out how to move my body in the correct way and in what order. I also began to be able to use environmental cues, such as the rhythm of the music, to let me know when it was appropriate to bust out my good moves in an in-sync manner. Reaching the last, Autonomous, stage meant I was able to reduce how much attention dancing required me to have and to be able to detect and correct errors. I am now able to close my eyes and “feel the music” or get back in-sync if I accidentally step on someone’s foot.

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Part III: Mixing It Up with Snoop Dogg and Latin Music

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Part III: Mixing It Up with Snoop Dogg and Latin Music

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While I was slowly learning to become a better dancer, it was really important for me to mix up all kinds of dances in order to be able to retain more when it’s time to leave it all on the dance floor. I had to practice my moves with new music, older music, Latin music, and maybe even some classical music just in case an opportunity came up for ballroom dancing. Similar to performance early on in my rookie dancing career, my performance initially featured many missteps, offbeat moves, and maybe even some self-tripping but as it turns out, this is simply the irony of variable practice.

Practice variability is defined as variety of movement and context characteristics a person experiences while practicing a skill. The largest impact practice variability has is that you are able to retain more and do better at a novel skill with variability practice even though you have an increased amount of performance error during the actual practice itself. Part of this phenomenon has to do with schema theory. Schema’s are rules about people’s own motor behavior that are developed during practice of a skill. As I began to practice my dancing more and more, I began to develop schemas, or rules about my motor behavior. These schemas allowed me to be able to move on from my early stages of learning to eventually get better later on. Contextual interference is another factor behind the usefulness of practice variability and the fact that disruptions in the memory or performance of a skill can generally improve someone’s ability to perform that skill later on. The more I was able to dance to a random selection of music, the better I was supposed to get at dancing overall. There are two main hypothesis for why this happens. The elaboration hypothesis says that random practice allows me to mix up all skills needed for each dance and compare and contrast one another, which makes them more memorable. On the other hand, the action plan hypothesis says that by mixing up my dances, I am actually abandoning and reconstructing the action plans I had previously made, which makes those memories more distinct and memorable. Regardless of which theory is correct, I know that practicing different types of dancing, including Snoop Dogg's, has helped me become a much better dancer.

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Some people thought early on that I would never be able to dance well because apparently, I was just that bad at the beginning. Some said I was too stiff and others said I danced like a grandpa in some ways, which could have been taken as a complement considering the moves of the grandpa below. What these people were unaware of was one of the concepts covered in our Kines 361 course, which is that performance early on in practice is a poor predictor of skill in some cases. My abilities used early in practice will differ from my abilities used late in practice, which is what an adequate prediction of success should be based on.

After looking at intertrial correlations and a study by Trussell (1965), it was learned that performance early in practice is a poor predictor of final performance and that the number and types of abilities needed to perform the skill change as practice continues. Part of these changes are defined by Ackerman’s Integrated Model in which he describes what abilities are most influential during the 3 stages of motor learning that Fitts and Posner developed. According to Ackerman, general intellectual abilities are most important during Fitts’ cognitive learning stage. These abilities include how we process information and can be seen in my own process of learning how to dance through which I initially had to get a general understanding of how dancing works. During the associative stage, perceptual speed abilities become more important. These abilities include quickly identifying information in a complex scene and memory use, like recognizing the type of dance I should be doing then remembering how I perform that dance, for example. Lastly, perceptual and motor abilities play the most important role in the autonomous stage. These abilities include reaction time, rate control, and stamina. Being able to practice my abilities in this third stage of motor learning has allowed me to show my haters that dancing like this grandpa is actually an achievement.

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Part IV: Literally Wiping the Floor with My Dance Moves

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Part IV: Literally Wiping the Floor with My Dance Moves

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Throughout the process of learning how to dance I learned that I had to be open to learning from different sources. At home I would be told to clean up and do chores in order to get better at dancing. At first this seemed like trickery to simply get me to do more chores. I couldn’t imagine being the best on the dance floor by pretending to wash some imaginary dishes but I learned that there are in fact some chores that can actually enhance your dancing skills, at least they enhanced my personal dancing skills. What happens is that the skill you learned in one task will transfer over to another skill. An example of a chore includes dancing with the broom as you sweep the floor. As shown below, you pretend the broom is your dance partner and show them what you got.

Transfer of learning is defined as the gain or loss in proficiency of one skill as a result of practice on some other skill. An example of this would be, as mentioned previously, you transfer how good you are at sweeping the floor over to your dancing performance in hopes that you would improve. This type of transfer is called positive transfer and occurs whenever a previous experience gives a beneficial effect to the learning or performance of another skill. Negative transfer could also occur though, which would indicate that the prior experience produced a negative effect in the skill you are learning or performing. For example, I usually iron my clothes at a very slow pace, making sure to cover every inch of my clothes with caution. Unfortunately, last time I checked doing the “iron your clothes” dance extremely slowly to most music nowadays isn’t very fitting or exciting. This does not mean that you should never iron your clothes again to prevent your dancing from having negative transfer but it does mean that perhaps you must select which chores you practice your dancing skills with carefully.