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me and my twin sister at the lake on our last day!

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Since I was 16, I have spent my summers working at Ashwaubomay Lake as a concessionaire. Ashwaubomay Lake is a man-made lake in my hometown of Green Bay, Wisconsin, and besides swimming and fun things like that, there is a small building that everyone must enter through. This building is my home during the summer, as it is where people have to go to pay to get in, and there is also a concession stand inside. On super hot days, the admissions/concessions area can get crazy. It can be hard to focus on whatever task I am doing, especially out in the heat. I also work with my twin sister and best friend, so there can be lots of distractions during the day.

In order to do my job well, I have had to learn how to allocate my attention to where it is needed most. In the concession stand, I have the job of making a variety of things, such as hot dogs, pizza slices, slushies and pretzel bites. When preparing a big order, it is common for me to try and do multiple things at once, such as filling a slushie while also trying to put a pizza in the oven. When two tasks are performed simultaneously, there are multiple things that can happen; both tasks can be performed equally well, one task can suffer in performance and the other can be unaffected, both can suffer, or one can even be prevented while the other is in progress. I have had all four of these types of attentional interference happen to me, and there have been many spills in the cafe because of it. I got fairly good at doing multiple things at once when we were not as busy. The registers we used were actually on ipads, so I was able to use the cash register while taking orders and neither performance suffered and were both performed equally well. When I would try to fill up a slushie and put a pizza in, however, both of those performances suffered and more than likely ended with either the slushie on the floor or me getting burnt by the pizza oven.

The Filter/Bottleneck Theory of Attention refers to the idea that humans have a limited fixed attention capacity, which means that each task performed has to be processed in serial order before the next task can be processed. This theory can be true when I am not super stressed or trying to do multiple things at the same time, but once I exceed my attentional capacity, it can be hard to do everything well. On slow days when I don’t have as many customers, it is easy to take my time to process each order at my own pace because there is not much interference. On busy days, however, it doesn’t take much for my attentional capacity to be exceeded, and that is when I start to get stressed and make mistakes like giving someone pretzel bites instead of the nachos they ordered. When I try to process too many stimuli at once, that is where I run into problems.

Overall, I got fairly good at allocating my attention to where it is needed most, but stressful and busy days can make that hard. As long as I slow down and focus on processing one task at a time, getting through a rush hour is definitely doable.

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me and my dad after my first basketball game!

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Practice Variability: From the Womb to the Hardwood

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Practice Variability: From the Womb to the Hardwood

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From the time I was in third grade up until I graduated high school, basketball was my life. I quite literally ate, slept, and breathed the game of basketball. I played for my high school’s youth program until 8th grade, and then I went to high school and made varsity right away. I also played AAU from 4th grade to my junior year. Basketball is one of the first things I think of when I think of my childhood, and it was the sport I was best at. When I first got into basketball, I was naturally gifted at it. As I got older, however, I had to start working and practicing more in order to stay good. When my parents realized that I really had a talent for the game, they put me in AAU so I could play and practice year round. One of the reasons why I think I was so good was because of how much I practiced. If I wasn’t at school or the gym, I would be out in my driveway doing drills. My goal at the time was to play college ball, so I knew that I had to practice as much as I could in order to maximize my potential.

For high school ball, I always practiced in my high school gym, but for AAU we would always switch practice locations depending on where we could get in. Whether it was my high school gym, a surrounding high school’s gym, or just my driveway, my practice environment was always changing. There were also other people in the gym with me most of the time, and practices would be filled with different types of drills. This changing of my environment can be explained as practice variability, and it is super important for retention and transfer. Instead of just going to practice and doing the same drill over and over again, I would do a variety of different drills to enhance my basketball skills. I had to get over my fear of failure in practice pretty quickly because of all the different skills I would work on during practices. I would rarely do blocked practices where I just focused on one thing. Variability of practice has been shown to increase your capability to perform the practiced skills in a game situation. Sometimes during practice when I would do multiple different drills surrounding dribbling, my performance during practice would not be very good, especially if I was just learning a new dribbling move. If I didn’t get a move right away, I would keep at it by alternating between dribble moves I knew well and the new dribble move. When I felt confident in my ability to perform the move in a game, I was way better at it than I had been during practice. I first learned how to dribble with my dominant/left hand, and the more I practiced, the easier it got to dribble with my non-dominant/right hand. My practice variability when I practiced my dribbling skills allowed me to be able to transfer the skill learned with my left hand to my right hand. Although I may not have been the best in practice, when it came to a game setting, I was always one of the best players on the court. Practice variability gave me good retention in a game setting, so I was able to do multiple different dribble moves in games because I had practiced a large variety of them during my practice sessions.

Overall, I believe that one of the reasons I was such a good basketball player was because of  practice variability. No practice ever looked the same for me because even if I was practicing the same skill each practice, it would always be incorporated into a different style of drill to make sure the skill could be transferred to multiple different situations. Basketball can be an unpredictable sport because a lot of the game depends on what other people on the court are doing, so practice variability definitely helped me apply my skills to different situations during games.

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When I was first learning how to drive, I was super nervous so my dad took me to our local community college parking lot to start. The point of this was to get me comfortable behind the wheel without putting anyone at risk because the parking lot was empty. As I got more comfortable and transitioned to the actual road, I realized driving really was not that hard. I had to take driver’s education just like every other teenager in America, but I actually did not mind it because it was another opportunity for me to practice on the roads. I didn’t realize it at the time, but during these driver’s education lessons I was actively putting the skills I learned into my memory so once I learned how to drive, I would never forget it.

During information processing, information must be retained and stored for future use, and this is where memory comes into play. The three stages of memory are encoding, storage, and retrieval. When I would drive, I would encode information from the environment, such as stop lights and traffic signs, and store that information for later use. In order to drive you have to obey traffic laws, so I had to store all of those laws in my memory during the storage stage. After I had stored all of these laws and encoded the information in my memory, the most important part was that I had to be able to retrieve that stored information and use it in real life, so those laws had to be put into my long term memory. My long term memory is responsible for learning, so the real test to see if I could retrieve my stored information and if I had really learned how to drive was during my driver’s test. During my driver’s test, I had to drive around Green Bay and remember not only all of the traffic laws I had learned, but also how to work the car. I was able to do this because of my long term memory, and because of the process of consolidation. Consolidation is the process of encoding information from active, working memory into permanent long term memory. During my test, I was able to recall what I had learned in driver’s education because it had all been put into my long term memory. My long term memory is also the reason for why I am still able to drive four years later. The skills of driving are permanently implanted in my memory, so driving is basically second nature now.

Overall, I would not be able to drive if the things I had learned during the learning process had not been consolidated into my long term memory. I passed my driver’s test with only three points off, so I would say that the driving skills were consolidated into my long term memory pretty well.

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Augmented Feedback: My Physical Therapy Filled Summer

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Augmented Feedback: My Physical Therapy Filled Summer

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My career goal is to become a physical therapist, so over the summer I shadowed at a PT clinic in Green Bay, Wisconsin. It had been super hard to get shadowing experience prior to last summer due to COVID-19, so I was excited to finally get into a PT clinic to shadow. I had been a patient at a PT clinic before, but this was my first time being on the other side of it. During my time there over the summer, I learned a lot about what it really means to be a physical therapist and all the little things that go into it. Up until last summer, I didn’t really think about the fact that when a person goes to see a physical therapist, they are completely at their mercy. I am not used to being the most knowledgeable person in the room about a certain topic, but when I become a physical therapist I will have to be in order to do my job the best that I can.

One major part of being a physical therapist that I didn’t necessarily realize is the amount of feedback they have to give to their patients. Augmented feedback is defined as information provided about a task that is supplemental to inherent feedback, and it comes from an external source. Inherent feedback is naturally available feedback that is provided by a person’s senses, so augmented feedback is meant to aid inherent feedback. Augmented feedback is a huge part of being a physical therapist because they have to tell their patients exercises to do to manage and help their pain, and also provide feedback on those exercises during sessions. Most people don’t just walk into a PT clinic knowing everything about the body and how to manage and help pain, so that is up to the physical therapist to provide that feedback to help them out. Besides listening to the physical therapists I was shadowing give augmented feedback, I was also on the receiving end of some as well. One thing that I really enjoyed about shadowing at this particular clinic was how hands on they were with not only their patients, but with me as well. I specifically remember watching a patient do an exercise to help with hip and quadricep stability, and the physical therapist I was shadowing had me do the exercise as well so I could feel myself what muscles the exercise was targeting. He gave me augmented feedback to make sure I was doing the exercise correctly, which I thought was really cool. There were many situations where I watched the physical therapist correct the patient’s form and alignment on certain exercises, but one thing I really noticed was that although there was quite a lot of feedback given, it was all super positive. I thought just the right amount of feedback was given to ensure success with the exercises.

Overall, I think augmented feedback is very important in a PT clinic setting, and it is necessary for me to learn how to give it in a positive way when I become a physical therapist.