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Baby Jay Eating: Demonstration and Mirror Neurons

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Baby Jay Eating: Demonstration and Mirror Neurons

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I was originally intending to something boring for my last scrapbook post relating to triathlon, but then I came across this awesome picture and decided to use eating instead. Eating/drinking is the most important motor learning skill that we must develop through observation as a young human child.  It is highly probable that baby me in this photo learned my cake eating technique through observation of either my mother or father (which explains why I evidently did not learn very well) eat some sort of food.  361 provides the reasoning as to why little jay was able to simply watch mom eat and then do my best to replicate this action.

Essentially my mom and/or dad provided a demonstration of the motor learning skill that is eating for my by reaching out, grasping food, and putting it into their mouth.  Going with the mirror neuron hypothesis, my brain was activating the visuomotor neurons that would be used for performing this action while I was simply observing my parents.  The result evidently was me grabbing cake and then, due to a lack of neuromuscular coordination, smearing it all over my face.

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Fortunately after 21 years of practice I seem to have finally gotten the hang of this eating thing. As you can see my proficiency in the motor skill of eating has dramatically improved so that I have no food on my face whatsoever!!!

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Lacrosse and Bilateral Positive Transfer of Learning

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Lacrosse and Bilateral Positive Transfer of Learning

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In high school (a bit before high school as well) I played the sport of Lacrosse which was actually one of the few sports that I was ever really any good at.  As a freshman I was already getting varsity play time, as a sophomore I was on the regular line up, and then junior and senior year I was a go to starter.  The interesting thing about this is that even though I was ahead of the usual learning curve (on our team anyway) it was not at all due to my abilities.  I have absolutely nothing when it comes to gross manual dexterity or bilateral coordination, which would be the two motor abilities most useful for learning the skill of lacrosse.  What I do have is stamina and like every human being on the planet I have the ability to develop my motor skill performance from practice (ie learn). I guarantee that I played more wall ball (playing catch with yourself against a brick wall) than any other player in my grade.  It was through these hours of additional skill practice that I was able to develop my performance on the right side to a proficient enough level to play effectively at the junior varsity level.  However, what brought me up to the varsity level of play was my early intuition on bilateral transfer.  In practice there was always a certain minimum level of performance that was expected from the players.  To play at this level most players could barely keep up using their dominant hands so that was what they did.  They practiced only using their right hands.  This would be fine, but unfortunately for them the game of lacrosse requires players to meet performance criterion on both the right and the left side!  Now as I stated before most players did not put in hours and hours on the brick wall outside of practice.  This resulted in them only practicing on their right side each week.  As we have learned in class this did yield some fairly significant carry over to their left sides when it came to game day.  Their practice did yield positive bilateral transfer whether it be from having developed the necessary cognitive strategies, the development of their generalized motor program for using a lax stick, or from the interhemispheric transfer of commands as they practiced using their right side.  In any case by putting in the hours by myself I was able to practice using my left hand exclusively without concern for how I was doing.  This enabled me to not only benefit from positive transfer, but also to gain true practice on my left side.  This yielded better task performance.

Below is a picture of my brother and I when we were both playing on the team together.

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To start off with a little background I am a personal trainer for rec sports here at the natatorium and typically work with 2-3 clients at a time.  Most of the clients who come to us are interested in weight loss and have never really trained in a gym before (if at all).  A large portion of what I do is teach simple weight lifting techniques to people who have relatively low levels of neuromuscular conditioning and coordination. The result is typically a very obvious yet gradual progression through Fitts and Posner’s stages of learning which is always super cool to observe.

In relation to the class I have always found observing the progression of learning to be very cool, but this only occurs if I am able to effectively use augmented feedback.  As we delved into the augmented feedback module, I was really excited to learn better ways to facilitate learning.  I have found on my own that prescriptive verbal augmented feedback after asking clients how they felt on the prior set is the best way of offering advice on technique.  I also observed over the past year that there are many times where if I withhold specific feedback the client will usually correct for the error on their own.  These were the basic observations I had made prior to learning about augmented feedback in the course.  Needless to say, when we got to the augmented feedback module I sat there giving myself a little pat on the back for not steering my clients wrong this entire time.  I find that the principles of augmented feedback in regard to when to give feedback and what feedback to give are extremely intuitive.  After just a brief period of observation I was even able to subjectively notice how impactful augmented feedback is when applied correctly.  Even though I already had the “what” component of augmented feedback down, I needed 361 to help me fully understand the “why” component which I now understand and have found to be very useful.

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World Of Warcraft: An Exercise in Information Processing and Response Selection

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World Of Warcraft: An Exercise in Information Processing and Response Selection

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The video game World of Warcraft is full of challenges that test the information processing skills and reaction times of players.  The game is really designed in a way to get learners to a proficient level at what are fairly simple fight mechanics in the open world so that when they progress to more challenging content, they are ready for fighting the boss which will usually layer these simple mechanics on top of each other to increase difficulty.  At the most extreme end, having these layered mechanics can sometimes result in decisions with many options that need to be made in a very short time frame.

To provide an example of this I will use the video linked below, which gives the basic idea of what one of these encounters may look like (I would not recommend watching the whole video as it is a 20 minute encounter).  Let us say that in a typical raid you may have 6 healers, 2 tanks, and 17 damage dealers. As a healer you are tasked with reacting to the incoming damage by casting spells which heal your allies.  In the fight below there is a transition phase in which your allies are taking high amounts of damage periodically along with large spikes in damage from a debuff that is being passed around in the group. You must stay near to the group in order to avoid taking excessing damage and dying.  Now this scenario does not occur in the video, but is a fairly common choice that healers must make: if a group member were to take damage that puts them at risk for dying at the same time you needed to move as a healer what would you consider and what will you do?  There are hundreds of different answers to this due to the nature of the game, but essentially you are tasked with a decision that has 3-4 options that must be made in less than 1 second (the time required for spells to refresh).

The options are:

1.     Is to use a slow low resource healing spell while remaining stationary to ensure that this player lives and take the damage for not moving on time.

2.     You can use an expensive resource healing spell allowing you to cast while on the move to save the player and stay with the group.

3.     You can just move and hope another healer is in a better position to take care of that player

4.     Move and then heal the player when you have time

There is no right answer to the question in the moment, but a smart raiding team will have a member on it that has hopefully taken 361 and understands response selection enough to know that as S-R alternatives increase our reaction times slow down.  Above I only listed 4 alternatives but there are easily 10-15 combinations that could be considered utilizing allies or abilities on long cool downs. This presents a major problem as the player has at best 1 second to react, but it is likely that this time frame is reduced, or it will be advantageous to move quickly.  The solution that every good raiding team has for these sticky situations is a plan so that healing is delegated to specific healers.  By assigning certain healers to deal with specific sticky spots in a fight the number of S-R alternatives a player must choose from could be cut down from 10-15 to 1-2 which massively improves reaction time leading to a quick and correct response selection.

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Paragon VS Lich King 25 Hardmode Part 3 of 3

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Swimming Scrub to Just Barely Passable: An example of Fitts and Posner's 3-Stages of Learning and Practice Distribution

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Swimming Scrub to Just Barely Passable: An example of Fitts and Posner's 3-Stages of Learning and Practice Distribution

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I will be the first to point out that this video shows the massive amount I have to work on when it comes to swim form. Last summer I decided to give the sport of triathlon a try having zero formalized training in swimming, biking, or running. I played football and lacrosse in high school which believe it or not had very little transferable skills to triathlon.....  I have found running and biking to both be skills that are fairly simple in terms of motor learning. This is great, because I have enough proficiency in both to intrinsically tell when I commit a technical error and then correct for this error on the spot without any augmented feedback.  While this checks off my abilities for 2/3rds of the race, the other 1/3rd in the swim is where I lack skill proficiency (as demonstrated in the video of me below). Without knowing it I have been in the acquisition phase of learning how to swim for almost a year now.  I know that I am not in the autonomous phase because I still find myself thinking about the movement pattern as I swim.  I also am unsure of when I commit a technical error or when I perform well.  This is part of why it is so difficult for me to self-teach swimming to myself.  The other massive contributor to my slow rate of progression is the lack of feedback that I have.  We have seen in class that knowledge of results and knowledge of performance are vital for improvement in a motor skill.  With swimming I feel as though I have very limited knowledge of performance and results since all I really have are my lap times.  While the lap times are helpful, they do not provide anywhere near as much useful feedback as augmented feedback does for me.  I have found that by far the most beneficial experience I have had in developing my swim were from the following; attentional cueing from coach “wild” Bill, video with form corrective cueing from my mentor Tim, and video with form corrective cueing from my experienced friend Ryan.

Part of me would love to just bulk practice my way to swimming success by swimming 2 times per day 7 days a week for a couple months.  However, if there is one thing that 361 has shown me it is that quality learning take TIME!!!!! This is why (and due to injury consideration) I space my learning out into 3 60-90 minutes sessions per week.  While this approach will take me longer, it significantly cuts back on injury risk and will improve the quality of my learning.  Hopefully by applying the techniques I have learned in this course to my practice of swimming I can eventually refine my swim economy and muscle activation patterns, but for now I will continue to push through the learning plateaus of my mediocracy.