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How I wish I could go back to high school and tell my coach he was wrong.  As a punishment for missing shots during games, my coach would make us sit in the spots that we missed and shoot 20 shots in a row at each spot.  This type of practice is called blocked practice and even though we began to look greatly improved in a spot by our tenth or eleventh shot, the retention for shooting at that spot and the transfer to game time were low.  As someone who is learning to shoot, a blocked practice schedule will benefit them for a while.  A blocked plan would benefit a grade school team that is learning how to hold a ball properly.  However, shooting from the same spot will lose its positive affect on the shooter with time.  Shooting from the same spot during blocked practices becomes an unconscious task because the individual is only triggering the previously constructed plan that is in his or her memory, according to the action plan hypothesis.  With random practice, or shooting then rebounding your shot and shooting at all the various spots the ball lands, retention and transfer are higher for game preparation.  Random practice requires a new action plan to be created for every shot, making each movement memorable because the shooter needs to reconstruct his or her plan for making the shot when each shot is from a different location.  If a scout were to show up to practice I would highly recommend sticking to the blocked practice schedule so that we appear to look competent in shooting.  When the game is on the line, I would hope that my coach had created a random practice schedule leading up to the big game so that the shooters were prepared to trigger any movement pattern stored from practicing.

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As a future physical educator I have been extensively taught the art of the game red light, green light. The teacher must understand the information processing model so that he or she can create the most epic game ever.  The stages of information processing are the stimulus identification stage, the response selection stage, and the response programing stage.  The response identification stage is where the individual senses that a stimulus has occurred and can identity what it is.  This is where the student hears the teacher say a color and recognizes what the color is.  Once a stimulus is identified, a decision is made in the response selection stage.  Variables of the stimulus can affect the students’ recognition of the stimulus.  So if the teacher calls red, the student will stop moving so that when the teacher calls green the students may have recognized the pattern and responded to the sound of the teacher voice rather than the color being said.  Once the student’s get the hang of the game, their response reactions to red and green will be what they have organized as the appropriate response to each stimuli.  Lastly, the response programming stage is the organization of the program needed to complete the movement from the decision made in the prior stage.  To throw the students off and spark some giggles, throwing in other colors such as pink and blue can increase the number of stimuli.  Suddenly the students have to listen closer to what the teacher is calling and their choice reaction time increases because there are more alternatives for their reactions.  On the other hand, the students’ reaction time may be reduced in the simple red and green calling game because of spatial or event anticipation.  If the students are able to anticipate from the pattern what stimulus is next, the amount of time required for a decision on a response to be made will be decreased.

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One of the greatest struggles for a college student is trying to make sense of why we can remember every word to our favorite song from middle school but cannot remember the theories we need to know for our exams.  The three stages of memory might shed some light on this frustration.  The three stages of memory are sensory memory, short-term memory, and long-term memory.  I think off these stages as “quiz I forgot about” memory, the “exam I should’ve started studying for earlier” memory, and “this is my jam” memory.

The “quiz I forgot about” memory, sensory memory, is where information first goes when it is presented.  The information only stays in memory for a short time, just long enough for you to nail the quiz.  The duration and capacity of the sensory memory stage depends on what sensory receptors are registered.  Hopefully you focus on what will actually be on the quiz because sensory memory filters out information that isn’t critical at the time and limits your recollection to about 4 objects.  Color coding the information or making flash cards could be a way to register your sensory receptors.

The “exam I should’ve started studying for earlier” memory, short-term memory, has the capacity to hold a small amount of information for a short amount of time.  This means that you will not miserably fail your exam because you will be able to remember the information until the exam, but you better pray that the final is not cumulative since you will have forgotten the information before then.  Actively rehearsing the information allows for longer storage of the information in the short-term memory stage.  According to Miller’s theory, the short-term memory stage can hold seven (plus or minus two) items.  By chunking the information, or taking the individual items and grouping them together, one can increase his or her memory capacity.  Chunking the information turns what would have been three items into one through the use of tricks such as mnemonic devices.

Our “this is my jam” memory, long-term memory, is created through consolidation or how often we access the information presented to us.  Thanks to the radio and spotify playlists, we are exposed to songs multiple times a day.  This constant interaction and the synaptic connections that we organize make the lyrics engrained in our heads.  But have no fear college students!  We are capable of remembering more than just the words to “Don’t Stop Believing” because my very eager mother just served us nine pizza pies.

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As any sports fan would admit, watching your favorite player choke under pressure is one of the greatest heartbreaks known to man.  Imagine this, the Warriors are down by two with 1.4 seconds left in the game and Steph Curry pops a three. But wait, he missed!  What?  But how? All he had to do was make a shot he’s made a million times before.  In the post game interview Curry makes a comment about how he doesn’t understand what happened.  He says that he talked himself through the shot step-by-step and he still missed.  Well, Mr. Curry, I may have an explanation for you.  There are two memory systems that distinguish between knowing what to do and knowing how to do it.  The knowing what to do aspect comes from the conscious memory system of declarative.  The ability to naturally or automatically perform a skill unconsciously is procedural knowledge.  Someone who is a novice at a task will talk themselves through the steps of the skill because they rely on declarative knowledge.  With practice, the individual will lose declarative knowledge of actions or words to explain what they are doing.  It is similar to riding a bike.  After riding a bike for a while you know how to ride it because of procedural knowledge but if you were to explain it to someone who has never ridden a bike it would not make sense to them.  This is because there are things you do while riding a bike that you cannot explain.  So Curry should have relied on procedural knowledge but he tried to pull on declarative memories that resulted in a poor performance of the movements.  Through his years of playing and all the shots he has taken, he developed small quirks to his shot that made it work.  When he talked himself through the shot he was unable to perform those quirks because his declarative memory did not recall or understand them.  His body knew what to do but he let his mind wonder back to his novice days.

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No one would be able to pick up a bat for the first time and be able to swing for the fences like Babe Ruth.  One cannot be blessed with the ability to instantly perform a skill at a proficient level.  Instead, a lot of time and practice goes into being able to perform a skill.  This sometimes tedious process is known as motor learning.  Learning a motor skill involves three stages according to Fitts and Posner: the cognitive stage, the associative stage, and the autonomous stage.

The first stage, cognitive, relies heavily on cognitive thinking and verbal processes or talking oneself through what you have to do.  The gains in performance are high for this stage considering the individual is trying out a bunch of new strategies, retaining the beneficial strategies and discarding the strategies that did not fit.  One who is beginning the learning process of batting may talk through each aspect of the swing starting with hand position and ending with the follow through of the swing.

The associative stage is the establishment of motor programs.  By this stage the individual can recognize what they need to do in response to given stimuli.  A batter may have figured out that when the ball is released from the pitcher’s hand, they need to take a step to shift their body weight in preparation of the swing.  Improvements can be seen during this phase but they become more gradual because the batter is able to perform movements that are more consistent.  However, the batter has not perfected or gained the motor knowledge to perform the movement at a proficient level.  In other words, while the individual is swinging they can detect errors in their movement but cannot necessarily fix them.  This is the stage that separates the Michael Jordan batters of Space Jam from the Babe Ruths.  While Michael Jordan was busy saving toon town, Babe Ruth was swinging for the stars.

Babe Ruth’s move into the third stage, the autonomous stage, was dependent on practice.  With this practice, the skill becomes automatic, reducing the amount of attention required.  Now the batter can process information from other aspects of the task, such as the path of the ball as it approaches the plate.  It is through the autonomous stage that Babe Ruth was able to hit so many home runs.  When the batter fouls off the ball, he or she now has the ability to detect what went wrong and the knowledge to correct the error.