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For many years, the belief about motor abilities was that all motor performances were based on a single, all-encompassing ability (Adams, 1987). A more general term for this notion is "general motor ability." This idea was supported by observations of some people seeming to be the best at anything they tried, while some people were not so good at much of anything. This concept would say that a few people would be very good at all motor skills they attempt, some would be very bad at all motor skills attempted, but most people would be average at all the motor skills they tried. Around the 1950s, many studies looked at the General Motor Abilities Hypothesis. One researcher, Franklin Henry, found that this hypothesis wasn't necessarily true when participants in his study performed well at one task and not so well at another different motor task. He proposed the Specificity of Motor Abilities Hypothesis which says that the number of motor abilities is large, abilities are independent of one another, and each skill we perform depends on a large number of these abilities. A great example of the Specificity of Motor Abilities Hypothesis in my life is seen when looking at the difference in motor abilities between my sister and me. I blow her away when it comes to any sport where you have to throw a ball, whether it be baseball, football, or dodgeball. However, she is much better with her fine motor skills. She is way better at motor skills like playing the piano, sewing, and making crafts that require you to have great finger dexterity. Even if we both practiced at the task that we are not as good at, we would never be as good as the other person because those are abilities we were born with.

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Stages of learning: cross country skiing

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Stages of learning: cross country skiing

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This past spring semester I was in a course where we did a different outdoor activity for each one of the classes. One of those activities happened to be cross-country skiing. Although I had done a little skiing back in my high school PE class, I had only used the most basic technique, which is the classic style. I was up for trying something new, so I gave the skate style technique a try. Little did I know, this technique turned out to be much more difficult to learn than I had anticipated. The skate style technique is where the skier provides propulsion on a smooth, firm snow surface by pushing alternating skis away from each other at an angle. I thought that I would get this movement down pretty quickly because of the transfer that would occur from my experience with ice skating and rollerblading. Unfortunately, I am not incredibly smooth at those skate-like activities, either. While trying to get this style down, I experienced the three stages of learning described by Fitts and Posner. The first stage in their model is the cognitive stage, which is when performances are based heavily on cognitive or verbal processes. In this stage, I did a lot of experimenting with which strategies worked well for me and which did not. I spent a lot of time on my butt in this stage, but I learned from the mistakes I made and eventually started to find a few reliable strategies. My performance was definitely not very consistent, as I was always trying out new things to see what would work and what would not. I surely made some large gains in this stage. Slowly but surely, I moved my way into the second stage of their model, which is the associative stage. This was more of a "refining" stage, where I worked at improving on the strategies I found worked well for me. In this stage, I got better at detecting my own errors. Despite improvement, I was still far from perfect and still made some mistakes. I don't think that I ever quite reached the third and final stage, which is the autonomous stage. In this stage, the skill is mostly automatic and the performer can both detect and correct their errors. Since I only had one or two hours to practice this technique, I wasn't able to get here, yet. Hopefully with more practice over the years I can reach this stage!

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Learning how to pitch with metaphoric imagery

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Learning how to pitch with metaphoric imagery

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For the first several years of my baseball career, I really loved pitching. Even before I was officially in the "kid-pitch" league, my dad and I were out in my backyard working on my pitching mechanics. For these first several years, I only threw a fastball because that is what is easiest on a developing arm. However, as I approached my mid-teens, I started to add in some other pitches to throw off the batters. One of the pitches I added to my arsenal was a change-up. When throwing a change-up, it was important that I didn't "snap my wrist" on the follow through, or at least not nearly to the extent that I would for a fastball. This different release was meant to slow down the pitch, and hopefully get the batter to swing way ahead of the ball and miss. I remember that one very helpful tip my dad gave me for throwing the change-up was to imagine that I was pulling down a shade when I was following through. He also had a tip for helping me with the follow through on my curveball, which was to imagine that I was reaching my arm around a barrel. These tips were very helpful to me because they stuck in my head and were easy to remember every time I was on the mound. It was much easier for me to visualize and mimic these simple tasks than to think about all of the individual steps involved in throwing each of these pitches. This strategy is called "visual metaphoric imagery," and is an effective substitute for providing complex verbal instructions for the task. The fact that these tips were able to relate a motor skill as complex as throwing a new pitch to something I already knew made the sequence of movements more meaningful to me.

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When I was a sophomore in high school, one of the volunteer activities I did was helping out at a youth program called "Little Dribblers." Little Dribblers was a once-per-week event during basketball season where a bunch of kids came to the high school and learned the basic basketball fundamentals from student volunteers who played on the high school team. I remember how early on in the program I had a hard time explaining to the kids how to do some of the basic tasks, such as the proper way to shoot. Even though I had gotten pretty good at shooting myself by that point in my basketball career, I had never had to teach someone else how to shoot, so it was a whole new way of thinking about the process. Now that I have almost completed this class, I know why this happened. When it came to shooting, I had always relied on my nonconscious, procedural memory to take over. This means that I didn't think about each step in the process of shooting every time I took a shot, but I just simply took the shot with ease because of the procedural knowledge I had gained from thousands of previous shots. My declarative knowledge, on the other hand, was lacking. This is the knowledge in my head where I explain how to do each part of the shot. It didn't take me long to become a great teacher to the kids, but it was definitely an interesting experience at first.

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procedural memory - shooting a basketball

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In the excerpt we read called "Motor Control in Everyday Actions," by Tim Lee, we learned that many human motor learning theorists believe there are three key steps in the learning process: 1) making a movement plan prior to action, 2) executing the action, and 3) evaluating the movement in relation to the original plan. Lee went on to explain how many guidance devices designed for learning motor tasks are ineffective because they ignore the first and third parts of the learning process, which are crucial in our learning and improvement at these motor processes. Now that I know that the best way to learn is usually without any type of training device, I understand why the person who taught me how to shoot a bow last spring used the methods he did. Rather than giving us any kind of device that would eliminate errors, he gave us a little advice at a time and let us learn some of it on our own. For example, I kept on shooting above the target at first, but through trial and error, I taught myself how to adjust my aiming to fix this issue. The fact that I had to stop and reflect on each shot afterwards helped the motor skill stick in my head. Later on in the semester, when we did archery again, it took me very little time to get my aiming down again. Had I used some sort of training device the first time around, I probably wouldn't have retained the proper way to shoot on my own as well as I did.

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Transfer of learning: from little trike to motor bike

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Transfer of learning: from little trike to motor bike

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When talking about my childhood days, my mom always seems to mention how much I liked riding my red trike alongside (or racing ahead of) her when she went on walks in our neighborhood. She said that I always enjoyed riding things like that from a very young age. It wasn't long before they had me learning how to ride a bike, first with training wheels. Slowly but surely I progressed my way up to riding without any training wheels at all, and without any physical assistance from my dad to help keep me up. Several cuts and bruises and many years later, I still love to go on bike rides. Back when I was 16, my knowledge of how to ride a bike came in very handy when I bought my moped. It took me very little time to get the hang of riding my moped just fine without losing balance. This is a case of positive transfer, which is the beneficial effect of a previous experience. In this case, I benefitted from my experience of learning how to ride a bike. The "identical elements theory" (Thorndyke, 1914) could explain why this positive transfer occurred. This view explains how two tasks that share a greater number of similar elements are expected to transfer more highly than two tasks that share fewer similar elements. The observable movement patterns are very similar between riding a bike and a moped because you must use your balance to stay upright and your hands to turn the handlebars and use the hand brakes. The force regulations required to maintain your balance while riding a bike and while riding a moped share many similarities, so positive transfer resulted from my ability to ride a bike.

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Back when I was in fifth grade, I joined my school's band for the first time. We got to try out a variety of different instruments to see which one we liked best, and I ended up choosing the trombone; partly because I liked playing it, but I think mostly because that's what my older brother had played and so we already had a trombone at my house. We had bi-weekly group band practices, and once per week individual music lessons with the band teacher. Our teacher also encouraged us to practice at home as much as possible. It was during these at-home practice sessions where I had to rely on only inherent feedback to know how well I was playing. This is the type of feedback that was naturally available from my sensory receptors while I was playing the trombone. This included things like how my lips felt while playing certain notes, how far out my hand was extended on the slide, and what the noise coming out of the horn sounded like to me. Although this time practicing on my own did help me improve some, it was always at band practices and during my individual lessons where I improved the most. This was thanks to the augmented feedback I received from my instructor. Augmented feedback is information about a performance that supplements sensory feedback. What is special about augmented feedback is that it comes from a source external to the performer, which would be from my instructor in this case. I remember one instance where he corrected the way I was holding the slide and it made a huge difference in how well I could play. Although I did not know the importance of it at the time, he also gave me the feedback after I had stopped playing (terminal feedback), which is usually the proper way to give augmented feedback (rather than concurrent feedback).

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Variability of practice: learning how to hit

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Variability of practice: learning how to hit

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Practice variability is defined as "the variety of movement and context characteristics a person experiences while practicing a skill." When learning new motor skills, it is important to consider how practice variability will affect performance during practice, as well as how much it will affect retention and transfer of the skill later on. Many of the studies that we read about found that variable practice produces greater retention and transfer of a skill than constant practice, even though performance is usually worse during the acquisition period for variable practice.
A real-life situation where I experienced the benefits of variable practice was learning how to hit different types of pitches in baseball. By the time I was 12 or 13 years old, some of the pitchers I faced were already starting to throw different pitches besides a fastball, such as a change-up and curveball. To help me prepare for this, my dad threw me a lot of different pitches to try and get me ready for the game situation. At first, he would tell me what pitch he was going to throw, and then would throw it so I knew what was coming and could plan what to do differently to time it out right. After I got the hang of what a curveball, change-up, etc. looked like, he would mix them up and we would do "mock at-bats" where we would keep track of the count and everything. When I didn't know what pitch was coming next, I definitely looked pretty funny swinging way ahead of some of the change-ups he threw me, for example. But, when it came time for the games, my performance easily showed how well the way we practiced prepared me for the real deal come game time.