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This picture is representative of when I was trying to teach my friend Maddy how to snowboard last winter. I have a lot of experience snowboarding and while I wouldn't classify myself as a pro by any means, I think I'm pretty good. When I was attempting to teach her how to snowboard last year I realized I couldn't verbalize what I was trying to get her to feel and understand. This lead to a large disconnect between what I was saying and what she was interpreting. In class this year I discovered the reason for this was that I have developed a procedural memory of how to snowboard, however I do not have a declarative memory of snowboarding. As soon as I am strapped into my bindings I can rip down a mountain, but when it came to trying to verbalize these ideas to Maddy, I felt incompetent as my teaching didn't seem to payoff for her.

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Hitting a baseball, in my opinion, is one of the hardest tasks in sports. I have, and continue to struggle with this after 15+ years of practice. Augmented feedback has helped me immensely in my journey to becoming a better hitter. As with any skill, augmented feedback is important to help enhance skill acquisition. This was most prominent for me throughout high school when my club team hired a former hitting coach from the Cub's organization. I would hit baseballs with him in the cage for hours and talk about mental approach, form, vision, balance and strength all related to hitting. His knowledge of performance was so high and he was trying to teach me the same thing through the use of video, demonstration, and verbal communication. I don't consider myself a great hitter but I would be so much worse if it weren't for his feedback during our training sessions. He was a great coach because after he explained everything he would make us practice and allow us to experience what he was saying, which is an example of movement kinematics of knowledge of performance. From this feedback, I was able to then self coach myself and understand errors I was making when hitting without him having to say anything. This demonstrates his ability to use the fading technique in coaching.

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Playing instruments is something that I never learned how to do growing up. When I got to college 3 of my roommates could play guitar. This upset me because I thought that if they could do it, so could I. I picked up one of their guitars and tried to learn some basic cords. What I was not prepared for what how hard it was going to be to learn how to move my hands out of phase from one another. I had always moved my hands in an in-phase coordinated movement. I could not wrap my mind, or my fingers, around moving independently from one another. In class this semester, I finally learned why this was the case. We learned that spatial biasing occurs when one limb is drawn toward performing the same task as the other limb. This happened to me when I was trying to learn guitar. I would catch myself moving both hands at the same time as if I was going to strum with fingers on both hands when I should have only been strumming with one hand and holding cords with the other. We also learned that if one limb has a bigger index of difficulty (ID) than the other it will have a larger influence on the other limb which can result in slower limb motion for the hand with the smaller ID. I also noticed that when I would move my top hand to change what note was playing, I would stop strumming because it took me longer to find the new note (harder ID) than it did to strum. Now that I know what I was doing wrong and what made learning hard for me, I realize this is a skill I will not be learning any time soon.

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As all of us did, I learned a new skill during quarantine. This skill was solving the Rubik's cube. Over the past year I have seen myself go through the entire process of Fitt's and Posner 3 stage model of learning. In the cognitive stage when I was first starting out I tried many things to help me remember the patterns of the cube. I made up nicknames that correlated with algorithms I was supposed to use. I also would mess around with my finger placement to try and spin the cube faster. Some of these tricks worked better than others until I finally could solve the cube by myself without looking at the algorithms online. Then I transitioned into the associative stage. Here is where I really began to refine my movements and eliminate unnecessary steps of the process. I endured many long plateaus at the same solve time during this stage. I didn't think it was possible to get faster at certain times but I persisted because I had to beat my roommates for who had the fastest solve time in our house. I was able to cut out most errors during this stage and if I did make an error, usually, I was able to fix it without having to start all the way over. After months of solving the cube I can say that I entered the autonomous stage. I am now able to solve the cube by memory with no hesitation in what algorithm I need to use. I can look ahead to see what the cube is going to look like for the next algorithm while I am solving a previous algorithm. I can even detect when the cube is unsolvable (my sister thought it would be funny to twist one of the blocks so that I couldn't solve it), but I noticed that I was seeing patterns that didn't exist in any solve I had ever seen so I knew the cube was wrong, not me.

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Above is a photograph of me playing hockey in high school. This demonstrates positive transfer and more specifically, the identical elements theory of positive transfer. I started playing hockey when I was a sophomore in high school, which by all accounts is very late to start playing a sport competitively. Over the course of two years I gradually became much better and earned a letter playing for my high school. What I didn't know then, was that my ability to adapt to the sport so well came from the skills I had developed playing other sports. I had grown up playing soccer and baseball. The use of my feet in coordinated movements (dribbling a soccer ball) helped me to skate more fluidly and use my feet to move the puck around in order to control/maintain possession. The development of hand eye coordination from baseball transferred to hockey as seen in my ability to control the puck with the stick away from my body. The ability to shoot the puck was similar to a swing in baseball which also demonstrates the identical elements theory. These were the two biggest skills that transferred from the previous sports I played and that allowed me to succeed in hockey, even though I started playing at a later stage in life.