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When I was in high school my favorite summer job was working in a restaurant in a very touristy town right next to mine. I was a bartender and server and although it was super fun, it was also very stressful for me. I can't tell you the amount of times I had to go back to people and ask them questions about their order because I forgot what they had told me. This told me a lot about my memory. Being a very touristy town and having Road America right next door, there would be some nights where I would serve up to 500 guests separately. These are the nights I would rethink my entire life and wishing I never would've stepped foot in the service industry. When I have a steady flow of customers, I love it. I can interact with all of them and get them their food in a relaxed matter, but when it starts to get super busy and my anxiety increases, it turns into absolute chaos. Serving really tested my short term memory. Some groups go very slow with ordering and make sure I have their items written down before I move on to the next person. But other groups would speed through their order and I would have to remember the order while walking away because I felt awkward sitting there for a minute while writing it down. Obviously these items were stored in my short term memory because I was only able to hold on to them for 20-30 seconds. If I didn't get them written down by then, I would forget them and shamefully have to walk back to the table and ask them what their order was again. This cause of forgetting could be caused by retroactive interference which is when an interfering activity occurs during retention. In my example, it was a customer talking while I was trying to remember the order I had just been told. However, serving for this long improved my short term memory because the longer I served, the more able I was to remember the customers items and remember them even without writing them down. So instead of the average seven +/- two items most people can store in their short term memory according to Miller, I could store up to about 15 separate orders.

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Once graduating from my time serving, I began to bartend. This tested my attention capacity more than I ever thought. Nights would be busy enough that I would be serving nearly 100 people every hour. Unfortunately many of these customers were intoxicated and wanted their drink urgently. When learning about various Theories of Attention, I learned that our attention has a capacity and it is fixed. This means I only have so much room in my memory to store things, and when that capacity is reached, I either need to get rid of something I have taking up space or not attend to other items that are being thrown at me. During these stressful nights, I would be trying to take someones order and also listening to other impatient customers across the bar yelling at me to serve them as well. It was very hard to focus on one person in these situations. This affected the quality of service I was giving and made me unable to focus on what the customer was ordering. This is because of the interfering stimuli of my surroundings. The Central-Resource theory states that all of the stimuli will compete with each other, and if there are too many stimuli, they can exceed the attention capacity and then I will be making mistakes when making orders because I am picking and choosing what to listen to. So if someone asks me for a Titos and tonic and someone else is yelling at me for tequila, I may make a tequila and tonic by mistake. Thinking about the Filter/Bottleneck Theory, this means I had to filter the stimuli and pick which ones were most important and then once I finished responding to those, I could go back and respond the the rest. So I learned to respond to just one customer and make sure they are completely taken care of and then help the next customer. Sometimes this would make me feel slow but I realized this was the best thing I could do. Serving really helped me learn about attention and taught me how to better manage stressful situations like this.

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For the years I played soccer seriously before I became injured, one of the hardest things for me to do was multitask with dribbling the ball and finding someone to pass to. I was a forward, so it was critical that I could do this because in order to make it to the goal, it can't be a one man show. I had to read the field and react to the opposing team's defenders in order to pass them and make a goal. I first started watching the defenders feet, but this was never a good plan because I wasn't looking up and would get the ball taken from me pretty easily. I then started looking at the legs, which still didn't work well, then the torso and eventually found out if you watch their head and eye movements, it's almost fool-proof to be able to see where they are going to go. Soon enough, after practicing watching someone's eyes I was able to steal the ball from defenders the best I ever had. I not only learned this skill but I learned how to pass better as well. I figured out where to pass the ball so that when my teammate was running, the ball would end up in the exact place it needed to be without them having to back track or sprint to get to the ball because I kicked it too far away. This scenario reminds me of when we listened to the stuntman in class and he explained that it isn't any equation you do in your head to be able to time things right. It is a feeling that you get when you know the time is right. Learning about visual search, I learned with practice it became easier to pick out the important informational cues in order to perform the best. So with practice I was able to filter the relevant and irrelevant environmental cues to be able to pass efficiently. I used saccades to focus on people and quickly take in my surroundings. All of my ability to be able to read a defender better and pass better I can thank visual search for.

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Starting in 5th grade, I found a love for running. This love for running blossomed into a very successful running career in high school where I ran at the state meet all four years in cross country and did road racing in the summer. I enjoyed cross country more than track because of the ever changing conditions and the challenges that different courses put you through. After so many years of practice and countless hours to perfect my racing, I was in the Fixation/Diversification stage of Gentiles Two-Stage model. I would consider cross country an open skill because of the changing environment for each race so therefore I was in the Diversification stage. This stage is characterized by being able to quickly adapt to spatial conditions and provides the learner with experiences to diversify their performance. As my running got more and more competitive, it was simply that. Each race was different weather, course, and people. I was able to quickly adapt to these changes and stay consistent with my times and even improve my times. Each race gave me a different experience that I can store to use in future running scenarios. I was very autonomous in my running in that I never thought much about the race and wouldn't remember the race once I had crossed the finish line. This further shows the fact that I was in this second stage because I was not making conscious decisions when I ran. When I first started running, I had to talk myself through the entire run to get through it, but the more skilled I became, the more I could turn on autopilot and just let myself fly. Thinking about how far I have come mentally while running shows me how I went from the first stage to the second stage of Gentiles Two-Stage Model in running.

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Dancing: Procedural and Declarative Knowledge

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Dancing: Procedural and Declarative Knowledge

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I began dancing at age 2 and have continued to dance until this day. Some of my fondest memories are performing in our ballet company's performance of The Nutcracker. When you begin to learn your role in the show, everything is taught by our instructor telling us the moves verbally and we have to perform then. This is our instructor and eventually us using declarative knowledge. Declarative memory can be verbalized and is conscious. The first month or two of practice I would talk myself through each dance, making sure not to miss a move. However, the more and more I practiced the dances, the less I had to talk myself through it. The dance became procedural knowledge and I would be so in love with the emotion and performing that I didn't think at all during the dance and barely remember it after. This is procedural memory because I was not consciously thinking about my movements and would be on autopilot.