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Everyone knows that feeling of when they are sitting at a red light or waiting for the signal to change when walking to class where you just want to go but you are not sure if the signal is going to change yet. This is an example of anticipation, and more specifically in this case, temporal anticipation. Temporal anticipation is when you do not know when something is going to occur. When I am sitting at the red light, I can see out of the corner of my eye that the light switched to yellow for the other drivers, and that is when the anticipation begins to set in. This time before the stimulus (stoplight) changes to green is known as the foreperiod. Sometimes these foreperiods seem like they last forever, and there have been times where I have tried to start driving because I thought the light was going to turn green before it actually did. This is one of the downfalls of anticipation, because if I were to actually begin driving before the light changes to green, I could cause an accident! Longer foreperiods can be detrimental because it can result in more anticipation and more errors. That is why it is important, especially when I am driving, that I do not over think and try to anticipate when the light will change.

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For many sports and activities, it takes a great deal of practice in order for someone to be able to retain the information they received and to be able to execute it properly in different situations. This is definitely relevant to when I danced in high school, as we were required to learn whole routines and needed to be able to perform them by memory. In order to perfect the routines, my coach would pick different small chunks out at practice that she would have us practice them over and over again until she was satisfied with how they looked. This is an example of how she tended to use blocked practice, which is when you perform all of one condition right away before you move on to the next one. This is one of the two extremes of practice variability, where the opposite end of the spectrum is random practice where there is no pattern in the order of how different conditions are practiced. My coach always wanted us to perform the same portion of the routine over and over until she was happy with how it looked, and only then would we do a different portion. However, there were many times that we fixed the mistakes that she wanted us to fix, yet when it came time to perform the whole routine, those mistakes reappeared again. According to the Action Plan Reconstruction Hypothesis, this is because with blocked practice, we already had an action plan in place for that portion of the routine and it is already in our working memories, so we didn't have to reconstruct anything. It may have been more beneficial for us to have a little more random practice schedule, which can prove to be more beneficial because you are continually having to reconstruct the action plan for that portion, so it is becoming more engrained into your memory.

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My friends and I have recently been playing a lot of volleyball since the weather has been so beautiful this summer. We always head over to the courts at Witte residence hall and play for a few hours. As much as I enjoy playing, I am never anyone's first pick when it comes to choosing teams. I do not have much experience with volleyball so I am pretty much a novice. A couple of the people I play with have been playing volleyball for years and are definitely a little more skilled than I am. Along with proprioception, your visual system is extremely important when it comes to performing motor tasks. Two major concepts used in volleyball are visual search and also the aspect of Tau. Tau is the value of the size of the retinal image divided by the image's rate of change in size on the retina, or in other words, it indicates how long it is going to be before the object reaches you. This value is critical in volleyball, as you need to be able to anticipate how long it is going to be until the volleyball reaches you. It also helps you to figure out when you need to move in order to bit the ball. Visual search, or directing your vision towards relevant cues and information, is also a key aspect in volleyball. It has been proven that novices and experts differ in where/how they search for cues during sports events. This means that when I am playing against my friends who are more skilled in the sport, they are most likely looking at completely different places than I am that are more beneficial to their movements. This takes practice, and maybe if we continue to play while the weather is still nice, I can change where I focus my attention during the games.

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There is nothing better than when a group of my friends and I get together on the weekend and bring out Just Dance. Our apartment always has competitions and it is a great way for us all to have fun and even get some exercise. Sometimes I like to think of myself as a Just Dance expert because I have played some of the songs so many times that I can basically do them from memory alone and don't always need to see the screen to perform. This is because these certain routines are engrained in my procedural memory, allowing me to perform them almost non-consciously. We have two different memory systems, and the procedural system is the one that stores information for how to perform certain skills. Because of practice, these skills often become automatic, meaning that you don't have to think about the action as you are performing it. This is what is going on when I am doing the dance to Pump It! by the Black Eyed Peas because it is my all time Just Dance favorite and I can perform it basically without having to think about the motions.

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Learning how to drive was probably one of the most exciting, but also scary, times of my life. It was finally my chance at freedom! A chance to be able to control where I wanted to go and when I wanted to leave. Before driving, I always needed a ride to wherever I wanted to go, whether it was practice, a friend's house, etc. But having a car made traveling that much easier. But before any of that could happen, I needed a lot of practice in order to learn how to drive. There are two common models that explain the stages of learning. The one that I can relate most to is Fitts and Posner's 3-Stage Model. It states that when you are first learning a motor task, you first go through the cognitive stage, then the associative stage, and finally the autonomous stage. During the cognitive stage, you are really relying heavily on cognitive and verbal processes. At this time the instructor really needed to tell me what I was doing wrong and to guide me step by step through the process of driving. I had to familiarize myself with the pedals, learning that you should only use one foot to work them. This was the time were I was inconsistent with my speed and applying too much pressure when breaking at the stop light. But after time, I entered the associative stage, where the strategies I had picked up on how to keep the car at a constant speed were becoming more engrained in my mind. I didn't need as much verbal feedback from the instructor and I was better equipped to be on the road. Finally, when I had enough practice under my belt, I gradually entered the autonomous stage. I didn't need to constantly be thinking about the little details of driving, like how much pressure to apply to the pedal. It was more of an automatic response because the amount of practice time I had completed. It always takes a little bit of time to acquire a new skill, but it is always worth it!

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One of my favorite past times when I go home to visit my family is to bust out the play station and play some Rock Band. I prefer Rock Band to Guitar Hero just because I really love playing the drums. You have to be able to coordinate both of your hands and you feet in order to hit the correct drum and step on the foot pedal when indicated. To do so, you need to use a combination of different motor abilities. Motor abilities are basically the building blocks that allow you to move. According to the Specificity of Motor Abilities Hypothesis, these motor abilities are independent of one another and your performance of the skill depends on how well you can combine these abilities. A major factor for playing the drums in Rock Band is multi-limb coordination, which is your ability to be able to coordinate multiple limbs at the same time. With the drums, you need to be able to use both arms and legs to hit the correct button. It also involves a lot of response orientation, which is making quick and accurate choices when there are other options available. This is very useful with the drums because when the colored note appears on the screen, you need to be able to quickly pick the correct drum to tap.

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Dance is definitely a sport that takes a lot of practice and hard work, just like many other sports. You need to dedicate yourself to it and put in the time and work in order to see the results that you want. There are many different tricks and skills that you need to learn how to perform, such as different types of turns and leaps. It definitely took me quite a bit to master certain skills, and a big thing that helped me as a dancer was practicing the skills that we needed to learn with the opposite limb as well. We always would do leaps with our right leg in front and would do turns where we balanced on our left foot and rotated clockwise. We rarely, if ever, incorporated these skills on the opposite side into our routines, however my coach always insisted that we practiced them with the opposite limb as well. At the time, I didn't understand the  reasoning behind this and I did not think it would be beneficial. But after learning about bilateral transfer I can see why she really wanted us to practice on both sides. Bilateral transfer is when you practice a task with one limb and this knowledge that you acquired is transferred to the contralateral limb. In my case, it meant that practicing my turns on my left leg is still helping me to improve slightly on my right leg as well. If I would've known this in high school I definitely would have taken it more seriously! There are two major explanations for why this occurs, one being a more cognitive perspective. This perspective states that when you are practicing on the preferred side, you are still incorporating the cognitive information about how to perform the task and this information is always available. So even though I didn't always practice turns on my right side, I was still able to perform them because I had the knowledge of how to do so.

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All throughout high school, I was fortunate to have found my happy place when it came to dance. I was part of my varsity high school dance team where I was surrounded by 25 of my best friends. We practiced a great amount, 2-3 hours every day after school, with the occasional Saturday morning practice when our coach felt that we needed more work. My coach was one of my biggest inspirations, she was very tough but it showed how much she was dedicated to our team, leading us to two state titles!

In this course, we talked about the benefits and risks of different types of augmented feedback, which is information about your performance that comes from an external source. In the case of my team, this external source was my coach. There are two different types of augmented feedback, knowledge of results (KR) and knowledge of performance (KP) that can be given to the performer. KR is feedback that informs the performer about the outcome of their movement. For example, a coach could inform their player that their field goal kick was too short. KP, on the other hand, is a little bit more common. It informs the performer about the characteristics of their movements that caused the outcome. It is normally used either to tell the person what they did wrong, descriptive feedback, or what they can do to fix their movements, prescriptive feedback. My coach's feedback of choice was definitely KP. She was able to watch a performance of 26-28 girls and pick out small individual movement characteristics that hurt the performance and would inform us dancers what we need to fix. She used a combination of verbal and video KP to show us what needs to be changed in order to earn better scores from the judges and to elevate our performance overall. After performances at basketball games, she would play the recording of our dance in our warm up area and would point out what she believed were the strongest and weakest points of the performance as we viewed it. It is known that incorporating verbal feedback with the video is a lot more beneficial and allows the performers to focus in on what needs to be fixed.

I feel that my coach did an excellent job most of the time when judging when to give us augmented feedback. She tended to use terminal feedback, or feedback that is given after the performance. However there were times when she would give us concurrent feedback during our performance at practice. It is known that there can be negative effects on your performance if there is too much concurrent feedback given because performers can become dependent on it. During our dance competitions we are not able to rely on concurrent feedback at all because our coach is not able to yell out from the sidelines to give us corrections. I feel that we did a great job of not letting the absence of concurrent feedback throw off our performances.