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Practice variability is the variety of movement and context characteristics a person experiences while practicing a skill. Variable practice is important since those who do variable practice have better transfer of learning and retention of learning. There are multiple ways to schedule variable practice to improve retention of a task but the two extremes are blocked and random practice. In soccer there are a lot of situations where you can use variable learning. In high school, we would do many drills that incorporated random practice. One example was doing throw in drills. The person throwing the ball in would throw it to a random part of your body and you would have to settle the ball and then pass it back to them. This caused you to adjust your body and react since you didn’t know exactly where the ball was going. Sometimes you would make mistakes and miss the ball or take a bad touch which seemed to make you look worse in practice. However, doing random practice allows for more transfer of learning into game situations so by doing this you can perform better in a game. On the opposite end of the spectrum is blocked practicing. We would also use this at some points in our practice such as doing 10 headers, then 10 one-touch passes and then 10 2-touch passes. After taking this class however, we learned that this is actually the least helpful way of doing practice since the amount of contextual interference is low so there won’t be as much transfer or retention of learning.

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Transfer of learning is the gain or loss in proficiency of a skill due to the practice of some other skill. Positive transfer is when there is a beneficial effect of previous experience on learning or performance. An example I can think of where positive transfer occurred in my life is going from riding a bike with training wheels to riding one without them. When I was younger, I used to ride a bike with training wheels as I was unable to keep the bike up on its own. However, when I got a little older, my mom took me out to practice riding a bike without training wheels. It took a few sessions but after a while I was able to ride a bike all on my own. There are a few theories as to why positive transfer occurs. One is the Identical Elements Theory which states that similar skill movements and context components lead to more transfer. This makes sense as to why I was able to ride a bike without training wheels because the movements are very similar to riding with training wheels. The two other theories state that similar forces and similar processing requirements could also contribute to positive transfer.

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All my life I have been playing sports and there are many stressful situations I have been in during them. Growing up I played basketball and soccer which although are team sports, do have situations where an individual is put on the spot to perform. Two key examples of this are shooting a free throw and taking a penalty kick. When you are beginning a sport you have to consciously think about performing a skill however after practicing it for years certain skills become automatic.

In class we learned about different memory systems that we use. Declarative memory systems are conscious and have words associated with them whereas procedural memory systems are unconscious/automatic and are very hard to verbalize. When one becomes an expert at a skill, they tend to store the memory of that skill in procedural systems. This is why when they are asked to describe the last time they performed that skill they often can’t recall the steps that occurred.

For me, both shooting a free throw and taking a penalty kick is unconscious and automatic. I perform the same routine and don’t think too much about it. However, during stressful situations I have over-thought what I was doing and I ended up choking under pressure. Choking under pressure occurs when experts try to use declarative memories to execute a skill that has been encoded in procedural form. This caused me to miss my penalty kick since I was trying to think about it too much. The picture I chose is of Ronaldo and shows the disappointment on his face after choking under pressure.

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Growing up one of my favorite Disney movies was “Finding Nemo”. One of the main characters, Dory, says that she suffers from short-term memory loss and is constantly forgetting things that Marlin just told her. At the beginning of the movie, Dory says she knows where the boat is and tells Marlin to follow her, but then forgot that she had just said that so she questioned why he was following her.

Short-term memory is the capacity to hold a small amount of information in the mind for a short period of time. The duration of short term memory is 20-30 seconds and can only hold about 5-9 items at a time. The reason Dory is forgetting information and not storing it into long term memory could be due to multiple reasons. One being proactive interference, which is when activities that occur prior interfere with the information one is trying to remember. On the other hand, retroactive interference is when an interfering activity occurs while you are trying to retain information. Finally, forgetting could be due to trace decay or time.