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We've all been there.. waiting in line at the side of the bar with 100 other people and it just feels like no matter what you do, you're invisible. You wave your card, hands, throwing elbows just to make a little more room for yourself. I never understood how a bartender could just completely over see me, until I became one. Standing behind the bar I am constantly looking around in the crowd for signs and signals someone new needs a drink. When I was in training, I was completely overwhelmed. I felt like I was never looking at the right things at the right time, and other bartenders would already be waiting at the bar, before I realized there was a person ready to be served. Through weeks of training I eventually was able to start noticing what I needed to look for in order to anticipate people coming up to the bar as well as come up with strategies of what to look at during busy times to not get overwhelmed. Looking back on my transition from novel to expert after months of bartending I realized that I had developed a more efficient visual search. As a beginner, my visual search involved picking up a lot of irrelevant information, making it take longer to differentiate between important and irrelevant information. For example, one of my first shifts my gaze was constantly shifting accross the bar, my attention was brought to almost anything that moved. As you can imagine this was very frustrating because I would constantly miss people coming up to the bar as my attention was on people walking to the bathroom, or playing darts. Months later I have developed a more productive visual search through a more concise movement filter and maps to better construct the features of the bar I work at. As I started to think about this project, I made a point to take in the definitive filters and maps I had made at work automatically over the past few months. For instance, there are certain movements that bring my attention to a person who needs a drink, such as a more aggressive walk toward the bar, versus just random movement. The maps I've made are based on where I look while I do my visual search. It might seem as though its easiest just to look around until someone calls your attention, but making specific maps and sequence of where to look makes it easier to anticipate. This sequence goes as follows: The entrance door, the front bar, the dart area, then the back bar. I have created this visual map to focus my attention at unique spots I know are often more busy than others. This allows for quicker identification of customers and faster service, making my boss and the customer happy.  Below is a video I took from behind the bar during the Big Ten Championship after we had our first touch down. As you can see, it is extremely busy and at night it gets dark and hard to see. Integrating these visual maps and concise movement filters into my bartending shifts has allowed me to pick up only relevant cues making my visual search way more efficient and my job easier.  Learning this in class made it really interesting to think about how my visual search has improved.

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Stage 3: Autonomous Stage
Because the stages of learning are a gradual transition, I think I am now somewhere in between stage 2 and stage 3. I have developed the ability to detect and correct my errors, and am in the process of thoroughly developing my attention and processing abilities. A simultaneous activity that I have developed through these stages is the ability to talk to the customer while I pour their drink. I've noticed that although this skill has improved, it has its limitations. For example, during non-busy day shifts when there's natural light and less noise I can give more of my attention to the conversation. During busy night shifts however, I have to give more attention to making the drink and less to the conversation.

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And on to stage 3...as I picked up shifts and clocked in hours I noticed that majority of the bartending skills I use started to require less of my attention, and conscious thought. (Continuously) Moving onto the third stage of learning!

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And on to stage 2... as I started to find the most effective strategies for making drinks, and being able to adjust these strategies based the context I proudly "moved" to the second stage of learning!

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Stage 2: Associative
When my learning developed I noticed I no longer needed to talk to myself to effectively and quickly make drinks. My movements accross the bar slowly started to become more fluent and consistent. I was also also able to start noticing when it felt like I made a mistake. If I started talking to someone, or got distracted I could feel that I had been holding the bottle up too long, and know I was going to have to remake the drink.

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Stage 1: Cognitive Stage
When I first started bartending I would have to work very hard to make a complete order. I would talk to myself... a lot.. either reciting orders over and over or counting out the seconds to hold the bottle. I also had to try different strategies make drinks such as ways to make the soda fizz not spill over, and different hand positions on the bottles.

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This entire motor scrapbook has had a common motor learning theme: the transition from being a novel to an "expert". I put it in quotations because by no means are my skills expertise, but relative to where I was at the beginning I have come very far. Through thinking of my journey I realized I can apply bartending to this class by organizing it according to Fitt's and Posner's Three Stage learning model. Below are examples of characteristics of each of the stages I personally went through!

I choose the meme to the left because, although I am close to the end of the stages, I am far from being finished learning and enhancing my bartending skills. There are so many parts of these skills I can practice and learn about to improve every practice. I am excited to apply the strategies we have learned about in class to not only my shifts but also while training new bartenders. This scrapbook is composed of four other ways learning the skill of bartending has been affected by concepts we have learned in class.

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"Double Vodka Soda... Single Rum and Coke... Double Gin and Water... Double Vodka Cranberry... Wait can I change that first one to a lemonade and the second one to a double?"

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"Double Vodka Soda... Single Rum and Coke... Double Gin and Water... Double Vodka Cranberry... Wait can I change that first one to a lemonade and the second one to a double?"

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Working at a bar can be overwhelming at times with having to remember orders with combinations of 2 sizes, 10 different non-alcoholic drinks to mix with over 50 different types of alcohol, and 35 beers on tap. I choose the meme below because it is such an accurate depiction of myself when I was first learning to bartend. On a busy night when people are ordering 3-5 drinks for themselves and friends I rely heavily on my memory to get me through. All these orders are a lot to process at once! Stored in my long term memory are all of the types of drinks I could and have made multiple times in the past, how to make them, and where the bottles are on the shelves. This information is easily acceptable to retrieve and makes its way into my working (short term) memory while I making the drinks. I've noticed there are so many parts of memory that we have discussed in class that are apart of my weekly shifts. This includes concepts about my short term memory, strategies that are used to consolidate long orders, and interference that can make remembering difficult. From the time the customer begins to order to when I complete the order I am utilizing my short term memory. Concepts such as duration and capacity of short term memory are perfect for bartending. For an average order of 3-5 drinks I can usually finish it in 25-35 seconds. This is the perfect amount of time for my short term memory to hold the information long enough for me to make all the correct drinks before I can forget the order.  For the purpose of this scrapbook I decided to make a little experiment of my own during one of my shifts. I can remember more orders for a longer period of time when they are ordered correctly (size, alcohol, beverage for example: double vodka cranberry as opposed to a cranberry vodka double), popular orders (rum and coke as opposed to a rum and ginger which is less popular), and/or all orders of one kind of drink (ordering 4 shots or 4 bottle of bud light instead of 1 vodka soda, 3 fireball shots, and a glass of spotted cow). I realized that all of these orders had one thing in common: subject organization. I used sequence organization and chunking to remember the orders for the duration of making the drinks so I didn't have to re-ask the customer what they ordered. During busy hours it can get really loud in the bar and with the music turned up hearing the customer can be difficult. This type of retroactive interference can make it difficult to retain the drinks ordered and I notice that I often have to have the customer repeat the order during these times. With months of short and long term memory development, I now very rarely feel like the meme below, which is nice cause those orders are stressful!

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There are two ingredients for mixed drinks: Alcohol and a non-alcoholic mix. Two major things must be taken into consideration while making these mixed drinks: the amount of alcohol that goes into each beverage (4 count for a single and 6 count for a double) and the amount of time to press on the soda button so the glass is completely full but not overflowing. When I first started bartending I had to do these two things separately. First counting out the alcohol and then filling the glass with the desired soda. This was because pressing the button with one had and holding the bottle with the other hand was too difficult. This method is inefficient and often takes too much time in a bar setting, so I started to practice doing them with both hands. This asymmetric bimanual coordination was very difficult at first. The temporal coordination was difficult to transition from novel to expert because the alcohol takes longer to pour then the soda, and the soda can be tricky because it often fizzes.  Because of this, you have to release the soda button, continue pouring the count of the alcohol while the fizz goes down, then re-press the soda button to top off the drink. During the beginning of my practice, one would suffer for the success of the other. I would either get the right count of alcohol, but forget to take my finger off the soda so it would overflow, or I would watch the fizz and end up pouring too much alcohol into the drink. Slowly with practice, I started to be able to get better at correctly pouring drinks with the right count and right amount of liquid. Another part of bimanual coordination that was difficult to learn as a novel was the phase offset to pouring drinks. For the count to go correctly with the soda it works best to flip the bottle up, start the soda, stop the soda while finishing 2nd half of count, flip the bottle down, finish the soda, then put the soda gun down. Because our bodies naturally want to be in-phase going the same direction at the same time my wrists wanted to flip the bottle and the soda gun at the same time, and put them away at the same time. It took a long time of practice and multiple shifts to develop the bimanual coordination I do now to make drinks accurately and quickly.

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Chasers Bar and Grille has developed an organized system to allow for quickness and ease of making drinks. This includes the stations we have to make the drinks, and the system we use to charge for the drinks. To the right shows a picture of 1 of the 5 "stations" we have to make drinks. Each station's bottles are set up identically left to right. Off the top of my head I wouldn't be able to list them out in order correctly, or identify every alcohol that's present in the well. But, if you asked me to make a rum and coke, my hand would automatically pick up the second bottle from the left. This demonstrates the procedural memory system I have developed for grabbing the bottles. I know this skill has become automatic because there have been many times that a bottle is misplaced and I will grab the wrong bottle and begin to make a drink. It will take a moment to realize the bottle in front of me was not what the customer ordered. Another example of procedural memory system use within my job is shown through the computer system (shown to the right). The buttons never change and most of the time I use the same 3- 6 buttons to ring up a drink and swipe a credit card. I've noticed in my recent shifts that I start so swipe the card before I even realize that I had already pressed the buttons. This shows the automaticity that I have developed. During a shift last week I wanted to test this memory, and the theory we discussed about chocking under pressure. I asked another bartender to race me to ring up an item. We took the order from our manager at the exact same time and off we went to our prospective computers. The second I started to think about the buttons and the order, I COMPLETELY CHOKED! It was like my muscles stopped and I suddenly forgot the location of the buttons I thought I knew so well. This was a strange phenomenon I kept in the back of my head through the rest of the night: every time I went up to the computer relaxed I sped through the sequence, but if I thought about it, even a little, the process seemed to be slower. It was as if my muscles completely forgot what to do, and had to rely on visual feedback to complete the transaction. WEIRD!
This procedural memory completely differs from the semantic declarative memory system I have developed for the soda gun. Pictured directly to the right is ONE of the 5 types of soda gun orders we have at Chasers. Each gun has a different order. Because of this, every time I go to a new station I have to use a declarative memory system to remember what type of soda is on the gun, but conscious visual feedback to know which button to press.