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All throughout high school I worked part-time for businesses around my hometown, but my favorite job was working at our local movie theater.  I was responsible for selling the tickets and concessions, keeping the establishment clean, and most importantly, running the two projectors. Keep in mind that these projectors were not the modern digital ones where you can simply download the movie online and press play, these things were ancient dinosaurs that required hundreds of feet of film.  Threading up the machines correctly took a lot of practice, but if done incorrectly the movie wouldn’t play correctly or it could even damage the film.

Initially the task of setting up the projectors took a lot of time and cognitive effort, and I was mainly dealing with my Declarative Memory System.  However, after two years of threading up the projectors I had mastered the task.  I was able to easily thread up both projectors while jamming out to music and talking with my co-workers.  At this point the task was mainly encoded into my Procedural Memory System and the task now required little to no cognitive effort.  I found that because of this change in memory systems, I had a very hard time explaining the process to new employees without physically performing the task.

I chose this GIF because it gives you an idea of the artifact that I was dealing with.

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At this point in my college career, I have gotten used to classes flying through information while I attempt to keep up with the content in my notes.  Normally I don’t run into too many issues, but this semester has been especially challenging.  I prefer to take hand-written notes, but classes like Abnormal Psychology made that impossible.  My professor flew through the slides like she was in a race, and each slide contained information I needed to know for the exams.  I found that the only way to keep up was to type my notes on my laptop as quickly as I could, which resulted in a ridiculous amount of errors.  My note sheet would be completely covered in red squiggles by the end of a lecture, and I could barely discern what I had typed.

I eventually realized that I had to slow down my typing and only focus on the main aspects of each slide. Using the speed and accuracy trade-off of Fitts’ Law, I was able to greatly improve the accuracy of my typing by sacrificing my typing speed.  My notes were finally coherent and studying became less confusing.

I chose this GIF because it looks like actual footage of me trying to type in that class.

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Baseball has always been my favorite sport, and I’ve been playing it since I was five years old. Performing well in the sport requires a large magnitude of skills, but I believe that batting is the most complicated one.  The task requires you to begin your swing as the ball leaves the pitchers hand, identify the location of the pitch while it travels in the air towards you, decide if you want to continue your swing, and then if you decide to swing you have to accurately position the barrel of the bat to make solid contact with the ball. This motor skill is both high in complexity and organization.

In order to practice this skill when I was very young, my team utilized part practice with the hope that it would transfer to the whole skill.  The swing itself is highly organized and it would be difficult to isolate certain portions of it, so we used the simplification strategy to reduce the difficulty of specific parts of the skill.  Instead of having the baseball pitched to us, the ball was simply placed on a tee.  This allowed us to reduce the attention demands of the task without changing the action goal.

I chose this GIF because that is how my swing would have looked had I not broken down the skill with Part-task Practice.

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Growing up, the highlight of my summer was always spending time at the lake with my friends and family. Every year my parents rented a campsite at a lake about 30 minutes away from my house, and we spent countless weekends swimming, fishing, and my favorite, water skiing.  My dad’s side of the family was especially enthusiastic about water skiing, and one of my earliest memories at the lake was of my grandpa barefoot water skiing when he was in his late 60’s.

A few years ago during the winter, I decided to attempt downhill skiing with a group of my friends. To my surprise, my experience with water skiing greatly helped me acquire this new skill.  When compared to one of my friends who had not water skied, I was able to keep my balance much better and weaving back and forth came very easily. There was a positive transfer of learning between the tasks, meaning that there was a beneficial effect of previous experience on learning or performance.  This transfer could be explained through Thorndike’s Identical Elements Theory, due to the similarity of skill and context components.

I chose this GIF because that is how I felt once I realized that I could actually downhill ski already. Most likely the ostrich is also a proficient water skier.

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When I was in high school, most of the sports I played were non-contact.  As a result of this, I had very little experience with weight lifting until I was in college.  For the past few years I have incorporated strength training into my routine and the experience has been great.  I am not training for anything specifically, and I am not very strong, but working out has helped me deal with the daily stress of college.  The mental aspect behind strength training has always fascinated me, and I have experienced how it can both help and hinder performance. For months I was unable to successfully bench-press 225 pounds because of the mental aspect of putting two more 45 pound plates on the bar.  When I told a friend about my issue, he recommended mentally rehearsing my lift before every session, and imagining successfully completing the set from my point of view.  I focused on the sensations I would experience during the lift, and eventually I was able to physically complete the set.

After taking this class, I now know of the benefits of mental practice, and how imagery can be used to successfully improve performance.  Specifically, the practice has been shown to significantly improve muscle strength, even without changing muscle diameter.

I chose this GIF because even though mental practice did not change the size of my muscles, it was able to increase my strength.