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This final example takes me back to my experience with guitar, perhaps the thing that I have spent the most time practicing my entire life. Within the instrument there are two major styles of playing: playing with a pick, and fingerstyle. Suffice it to say that these two styles are so dissimilar it is like learning two different instruments. Therefore, I have had to practice both for a very long time to get good at either. I am far better with a pick than with my fingers since I don’t want to learn too many songs that are fingerstyle, but I still practice them both when I play. I have found that it is easiest for me to learn when I am switching back and forth intermediately when I play, because it gives me a break from one constant form of stimulus, and allows me to challenge my brain in another form of playing. My whole playing career I had just believed that it was based on personal preference that I chose to practice like this, but now I understand that there is a researched correlation between this type of practice and results. I tend to prefer a hybrid of blocked and random practice, which is considered an intermediate condition. Although it is not so random because it consists of one after the other, I prefer the “serial and small randomized block practice” as it was referred to in lecture 14. We were told that this intermediate condition provided similar results to random practice, which was experimentally determined to be more effective than blocked practice in “Hall et al. (1994)”. It is extremely gratifying to understand that there is a rhyme and reason behind my practicing habits, and that they are actually helping me develop my skills at an optimal level.

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This second image is NBA great Tim Duncan shooting a free throw in a hostile away game environment. As you can see painfully clearly, the fans are waving around white tubes in order to try and distract Tim Duncan from making his free throw. This is a strategy that is employed by most home fans during an away team’s free throws. I always understood that the point of the tubes is to distract the player, but I never understood the reasoning behind it until now. This is a classic example of structural interference. This is caused by the stimulation and use of multiple processing systems at once, such as receptors, integrating centers, and effectors. The effectors trying to be focused are the skeletal muscles being used for the free throw, and the interference occurs during the simultaneous, and unavoidable visual stimulation (tubes) affects the receptors and processing systems (eyes and central command). This conflict of attention is what causes even NBA players, the best basketball players in the world, to miss free throws more often.

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This first image is supposed to relate my guitar playing in real life to the popular video game Guitar Hero. I first got into this game around the age of 8, when my fine motor skills were not fully developed to say the least. This resulted in me playing the toy guitar more like a piano, laying it down on the ground and pressing the buttons with my left hand while I flicked the strummer with my right hand. This practice did not change, and I obviously never got better at the game, so I put it down. Four years later, I picked up a real guitar with a teacher, and I got pretty good over the course of about 3 years. I decided that it was time to revisit this game that gave me trouble as a kid, and to my surprise I was able to complete songs in expert mode effortlessly. This is a classic example of positive transfer, which makes sense because the two tasks are extremely similar, with just a few very noticeable differences. This could be due to the Identical Elements theory which states that similarity of skill and context components play a large role in the positive transfer of skill from one task to another. Although one may argue that the transfer-appropriate processing theory does not apply in this scenario, I would disagree. From the perspective of a guitar player, I prepare to play a song by sounding out the part of the songs coming up in about 10 or so seconds , and if I am familiar with a song on guitar hero, which I am for most of them, I will use this same strategy. This requires memorization of the whole song and an understanding of the stimulus that is upcoming. Therefore, I would claim that I process songs in guitar hero the same way that I do in real life, and would argue that the transfer-appropriate processing theory is applicable as well as the identical elements theory.

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This picture shows Cincinnati Reds catcher Chad Tromp attempting to get a runner out on a stolen 2nd base by throwing the baseball as fast as he can down the field. The only issue is that he hits his pitcher, who was sort of in the way but not directly in the path of the catcher to 2nd base. If you look at the video closely you can see that the pitcher was a bit to the left of 2nd base, but Tromp throws a slightly inaccurate ball and hits his pitcher instead of getting the ball to 2nd base where he intended to. This inaccuracy was due to the fact that he sped up his throwing motion to get a higher velocity on the baseball. This is a perfect example of the speed accuracy tradeoff. This speed accuracy tradeoff is the relationship in which either speed or accuracy has to be sacrificed to get more of the other in cases where extreme speed or accuracy is needed. This speed-accuracy tradeoff is consistent with Fitts’ Law, which determined through controlled human movements that the more accurately a movement is, the slower it will go. This was found in saccades that tested both response time and deviation from target area. The speed-accuracy tradeoff is applicable to most other sports scenarios, such as soccer and hockey shots, football throws, and golf swings. In Chad Tromp’s case, he needed to get the ball to 2nd base as fast as he could to beat the runner, so he sacrificed his accuracy a little bit to get this done. Unfortunately for him, this resulted in him hitting his pitcher, resulting in an embarrassing highlight.

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This is a picture of my best friend Daniel, who plays goalie at St. Norbert college. I enjoy this picture in particular for the facial expression (LOL). I have made him teach me about playing goalie throughout the years because I think it is a really fun position to play, and I take what I learn to play intramural soccer here. The position of goalkeeper is extremely nuanced, with a lot of memory components that play into your decision making. For example, a low, left side shot for me is going to elicit a response from my leg to make a save with my foot. For a shot that is going up high to my right, however, I will lunge out and reach towards the ball with both hands to try and make a diving hand save. This decision making is based on the memories and learning experiences that I have had from trying out different saves for different shots and seeing what works for each one. The memory of the way that I made the saves and the stimulus that allows me to decide what save to attempt is called procedural memory, and is defined as memory involving how to perform different tasks. This differs from declarative memory which is based on recall and retrieval. My declarative memory is what allows me to articulate my thought process involving different shots and my responses to them. This is a rare instance where I have both declarative and procedural memory for a certain task. With many tasks such as riding a bike, people either have declarative or procedural memory, and in the case of riding a bike it would be procedural memory, since most people can’t explain step by step how to ride a bike, at least as well as they can perform their procedural memory.