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When I was learning how to play soccer, I don't remember receiving much augmented feedback. Often times my team was given instructions to complete a drill and feedback was given to the group. Rarely was a player given personal feedback unless the a player asked the coach a question directly. When my team would practice shooting drills (granted this was when we were younger), we were left to only our intrinsic feedback and knowledge of results (where did my shot land? Did it hit where I was aiming? How did my shot feel?).

The only time I remember receiving augmented feedback from my coach was when I was maybe 12 years old. She saw me get frustrated at my inaccuracy and noticed a flaw in my technique. She merely suggested that I aim with my hips--a player can increase their accuracy by facing their target directly while they pass or shoot. After that year I began to get a reputation on my team for an accurate shot.

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The idea of abilities being separate from skills never struck my until taking this class. I always assumed that they conveyed the same meaning. However, describing an ability as a trait helps to clarify the difference. I'm an active person, but by no means am I a high profile athlete. I don't have the same capacity as many others to perform certain physical tasks.

My freshman year at UW Madison humbled me. During my SOAR, I saw coaches asking incoming freshman to try out for the rowing team. I wasn't approached (no surprise, I don't have what one would consider to be a typical rowing frame) but I was interested in crew. I gave it a shot when I came back late in August. And maybe I should've taken their cold shoulders for what it was worth--I was not cut out to make that team. I was fit enough, but my size gave me a large disadvantage when compared to the other guys (who all had half a foot or more on me at the time). Seeing the boathouse full of rowers was interesting--certain people had body configurations which made them wonderful or forced them to work harder, or they were light and small enough to be a coxswain. I'm glad I'm wasn't athletic enough to row, though.

Another ability which could serve as a limiting factor would be visual acuity. Most motor tasks rely on visual acuity, a topic we discussed briefly at the beginning of the semester. Those with higher visual acuity are likely to perform particular aiming motor tasks, as well as other motor tasks which rely on the participant to know the positions and movements of regulatory variables.

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One of my friends from high school asked me if I could teach him how to play saxophone (my instrument through highs school), and I was surprised at how little help I could be to him on this. I wasn't a poor player by any means, I performed decently. But what was strange is that I couldn't describe how to produce a proper embouchure at all. I knew how to do it, my tone was still pretty decent after a year or two of not playing, but I could not for the life of me tell him exactly what to do. "Put your lips around the mouthpiece?" Sure. "Just blow?" Not really, you use your tongue to produce a tone. "How do you do that?" Beats me, you just do it. I had no declarative memory for playing sax. I had to take a couple practice measures in order to get a better idea of what to tell my friend. Even then, I was paying attention to things that I wouldn't necessarily focus on during a performance.

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I always thought that being able to play set was the coolest skill when I was younger. My older brother and I (we were probably 7 and 10 at the time) used to pretend to be in bands and I would always dibs playing drums. It wasn't until I was about 12 that I realized how difficult playing set was. My friend had a set and he already could keep a pretty steady beat, but when I tried to create the same beat my limbs resembled a helicopter at times or were stuck in unison. I had a strange affinity for symmetrical bimanual movement that I couldn't shake when it came to drums. I've found that I have an easier time with asymmetrical bimanual coordination with console games or typing on a keyboard, however, but that may be due to amount of practice (for example, I work for an IT organization, so I do a fair amount of typing, but I don't spend a similar amount of time throughout the day playing drums).

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Since I'm studying some rehabilitation techniques as a part of my education in kinesiology and athletic training, I've seen some interesting movement patterns (surprising since some of these individuals are highly capable athletes!). One thing I've come to notice is that sometimes a person can be instructed to perform a certain movement and not be able to do so in an bio-mechanically simple way. Now, I don't claim to be perfect either--I definitely have some quirky motor habits. But something spectacular happens when an individual is told to do the same motion in a mirror. They still perform their flawed motion, but wow does their reaction give it all away. These motor programs get processed and memorized partly through proprioceptive receptors, and without visual feedback they guide us through movement. However, mirrors provide a great amount of visual feedback which can be used to alter the GMP in hopes that poor body mechanics improve.

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I sometimes think that I was born a little deficient in the attention department. I'm sure you could ask any of my friends that if someone tries to hold a conversation with me while I'm intent on an assignment, homework, reading, or a game, I can go a quite a while without noticing that anything is going on. I have a very limited attention span and I'm okay with that. My girlfriend, however, can attest that it's probably one of the most annoying talents that I have. Sometimes it's like talking to a zombie.

I've noticed this in other activities as well. One summer, I went with two of my friends to visit his uncle at Lake Geneva and take to the lake with a wake surfboard. Having wakeboarded before, I figured wake surfing would be pretty easy to grasp. I was still a novice at water sports like wake surfing, and Sam's uncle took it upon himself to try to give me some instruction while I learned to surf....as you can tell, my "talent" worked against me in every way possible. (edit: I wasn't able to retrieve the video due to my friend's privacy settings. Lets just say it looked somewhat like this)

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Even though my example is practically identical to the one given in the reading covered in class, the phenomenon of involuntary attention switching has been plaguing me almost daily. If someone could cure this, they would be my hero. Often times I find myself reading on my lunch breaks at work to have my attention be grabbed by conversations of passerby's, or by the chatter of birds coming into range of my hearing (the latter being much more enjoyable, of course). What gets me is that I still can't figure out how to limit this involuntary switching reflex.

Now, I'm sure that this involuntary attention switch can be identified in a lot of life situations. I've noticed it when I'm studying for an exam and my roommates are coming in hot from a frisbee practice. But one of the more humorous places I've seen this happen is when I'm playing frisbee or soccer at a park with friends. I've seen some of my friends lose all attention on the game to a cute girl walking by. It's striking. One moment they're present in the game, and by the flick of a switch they disappear.

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Right as we began the semester we discussed how to classify movements and how that can benefit clinicians in their efforts to help patients retrain certain motor skills by increasing the difficulty in a step-wise manner. I believe that coaches in almost any sport could apply this same technique to help their players become more proficient. In fact, I vaguely remember going through the process of learning how to properly strike the ball with my head. We were first instructed to hold the ball out in front of us and guide our hairline towards the ball (stationary regulatory conditions, no intertrial variability, body movement, no object manipulation yet) and then as we began to acquire the skill, we jumped to other conditions within Gentile's two dimensional classification system, with the final practice scenario including moving regulatory conditions, intertrial variability, body movement, and object manipulation.

The gif below shows players utilizing a large amount of moving regulatory variables to distract the opposing team during their play.