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This is a picture of me and the UW Rugby team after we won the first game of our season 2 years ago! Rugby is an interesting sport in that it is like a mixture of both football and soccer. It is played with 40-minute halves with non-stop action, much like soccer. It also has a lot of contacts (tackling and running the ball), making it similar to football. In saying this, there are a number of different rules that make rugby unique, the most prominent being that you cannot pass the ball forward. Because of this, in order to gain yardage in a match, you need to be running with a good head of steam before you even have the ball. A teammate will see you and then toss you the ball right before you cross in front of them. This technique requires feedforward processing. Feedforward is when there is a signal sent out from the brain to the body that prepares it for an upcoming motor command and also alerts it to a particular type of feedback information. In the case of rugby, a player would first get a signal preparing them to get ready to run onto a ball. This would look like having on foot forward (getting ready to run), having a forward tilt to their upper body (bracing for contact), and having their hands up (preparing to catch a ball thrown their way). All of this is an example of the feedforward process needed in preparing the body for a motor command. In addition, there would be an awareness made for the body as a whole for not only the possibility of a ball being thrown their way but also preparation that they may be receiving contact right as they catch the ball. the body's use of feedforward processing, without which it would be almost impossible to gain any ground on the field.

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Running to the Airport-Gentile's Taxonomy

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Running to the Airport-Gentile's Taxonomy

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In the last semester of my junior year, my roommates and I decided to take a trip to DC. It was a last-minute decision, which came back to bite us in the rear when we woke up and forgot how early our flight was back home. The photo is of us rushing to the train station so that we wouldn't miss our flight home. With this, it made me think about Gentile's Taxonomy of Motor Skills. With this, there are a number of factors that lead to our last-minute scramble to the train station coinciding with a 16 on Gentile's taxonomy of different functionality and environmental context. To begin with, my friends and I would be in the far-right column of function (transport object manipulation), as we were carrying our luggage across the city of DC to the airport. As for the environmental context, we would fit into the moving regulatory conditions and intertrial variability. This is because we were actively dodging traffic and people as we made our journey, and if we were to do the same path a second time, there would not be the exact same obstacles/distractions as the first time. All of this leads me to conclude that we would fit best in the 16th panel of Gentile's Taxonomy of Motor Skills.

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Killing a Chicken-Interference and Attention

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Killing a Chicken-Interference and Attention

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In the summer of 2021, I took a mission trip to Zambia where I met different Zambians in the village of Luyaba and talked to them about Jesus! A group of friends and I spoke at church and the people of the church gifted us a chicken! I named him Gerald. Unfortunately, the rest of my team didn't let me keep Gerald and we killed him for dinner :(. Looking back I think about how interference and attention played a role in how I carried Gerald around. In order to keep Gerald from running away, I had to hold his legs and make sure that he didn't break free. Because of this, I experienced a type of structural interference, as I was unable to perform anything in my right hand as I was holding Gerald's legs with that hand. This interference made it so that my attention was focused on Gerald, with my right hand being unable to attend to another task. Knowing that I was experiencing structural interference, we can be certain that my attention was being used up. This can be understood when looking at the central resource theories of attention, where there is a specific attention capacity that cannot be exceeded. In this scenario, my right arm and attention were all being used up in making sure Gerald didn't run away that I would have been unable to complete a different task, such as pouring a cup of tea.

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This photo was taken this past summer at one of my friend's weddings. The ceremony was beautiful and afterward, one of the things my friends and I did was dance. To be completely honest I am not the best dance by any means. I am not especially well-coordinated and can't do any special moves like a backflip or the splits. However, I do still enjoy it and one thing that I realize that I do is that I mentally rehearse the move I'm going to do before doing it. This is exactly like mental practice, where I am cognitively practicing a skill in my mind in the absence of any physical movement of my body. I find myself utilizing both internal and external imagery when mentally rehearsing my dance moves. For the internal imaging, I think about the different moves I could do, the sequence they would go in, and what it would be like at the moment to do those moves. I also use external imaging, as I imagine what each move would like from the perspective of an observer on the dance floor. I didn't until doing this assignment that I put so much mental effort and rely so much on mental practice in order to perform different dance moves. And in the end, even with all the mental effort I still am an exceptionally average dancer :).

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Above is a picture of my friends and I belaying as mountaineers at a Christian camp in Colorado! I had gone to the camp as a camper with my family ever since I was 1 year old and I have been a camp counselor in the summers of 2018-2020! Part of my responsibilities with working at the camp was being a mountaineer where I would take kids rappelling, rock climbing, hiking, and camping! With rock climbing and rappelling, it was necessary for me to be put through training for belaying, which is the technique where one person is attached to one end of the rope while another person is climbing or rappeling. With this, it is imperative that I give all my attention to the camper on the rock wall, meaning that I can't be concentrating on what I am doing. This is where procedural memory comes into play. Procedural memory is the unconscious, automatic use of long-term memory that is utilized for specific cognitive, perceptual, and motor skills. This allows for individuals to not have to consciously think about each movement that they have to make, with procedural memory doing it for them. From my countless hours of belaying, I have the proper technique that I can utilize with procedural memory automatically so that I can give all my attention to the camper climbing. If I were to best describe the technique needed for belaying, I could most accurately depict it by recreating the actions rather than verbalizing it, as recreating it would be a way in which my procedural memory is active. Verbalizing it would be using declarative memory, which is not as effective in showing the technique the most accurately.