It wasn’t until I reached high school when I was presented with the opportunity to play tennis. I had always loved to hit around with my dad on the courts near my house but I didn’t have nearly enough experience or guidance to truly consider myself as a “tennis player”. So when I signed up to play on my high school’s tennis team I had a lot to learn and even more to practice.

Over the course of the four years I played on the team, the beginning of our practices were fairly consistent. We spent at least the first half hour practicing a variety of forehands, backhands, volleys, and overhand shots. The “mixed bag” of shots, as my coach called it, kept us on our toes and allowed us to develop a schema under variable practice conditions that would transfer well when playing in a match.

According to the schema theory, with practice, people develop cues about their own motor behavior and use these cues in various ways to adjust to different practice scenarios and their outcomes. In order to develop an effective schema, the learning or practice of a skill should be varied rather than constant. A schema formed under variable practice conditions will be strong and the individual’s ability to reproduce practiced and novel skills will increase.

Now I’m not saying that because of my coach’s decision to have us practice a “mixed bag” of shots every day makes me a pro tennis player and ready to play The Queen, Serena, BUT I do credit the variable practice to my agility and ability to transition well between shots during a match.

When I was a young, beginner freshman, my coach would often come talk to me between games or sets during a match. He would offer words of encouragement and tips for how to improve, providing much needed augmented feedback while I was still getting a grip on my game. However, much to his dismay, as I grew in skill and became more comfortable and confident in my play, I relied on his feedback less and less. If I wasn’t personally satisfied with the way I was playing I would be focused on figuring out what needed to change in order to win. So, whenever he came to talk to me his feedback would interfere with my mindset and throw me off. This theme of feedback provided during matches transferred to practice with my coach providing less and less feedback as I progressed in my skills and awareness of play.

Although the concept of augmented feedback may seem fairly straight forward, the precise timing and delivery of it can be a very sensitive thing. In the beginning of my tennis career, the augmented feedback from my coach provided enhanced my skill acquisition and allowed me to learn quicker and perform at a higher level. However, as I progressed I began to rely on his feedback less and less to the point where when he would provide feedback during practice or a match it would hinder my learning and overall performance as it would interfere with my task-intrinsic feedback concerning the outcome of my performance.

Top picture: my tennis partner and I receiving augmented feedback from our coach during my freshman year
Bottom picture: me, being left alone and reflecting between sets, my senior year

You see, the light switches in my apartment last year were always on the left side when entering a room. However, in my apartment this year a majority of the light switches, specifically the light switch in my bathroom, are on the right side of the door frame. Now this doesn’t seem like a huge deal until I would walk into the bathroom and reach to the left to turn on the light, fumble around the wall searching for the switch for a while, before I sigh and remember that the switch is on the opposite wall. Yet again I had fallen victim to the concept of negative transfer, more specifically, cognitive confusion.

Negative transfer occurs when environmental context characteristics of two performance situations are similar, but the movement characteristics are different. There are two situations in which negative transfer is likely to take effect: first, perception-action coupling, or when a memory representation is developed as a result of learning a skill and then the wrong skill is performed out of habit; second, cognitive confusion, or performing the correct skill, just in the wrong location. 

In the instance of my light switch switch-up, I experienced negative transfer as a result of cognitive confusion. My mind and body had become accustomed to reaching to left to turn on the switch so much that it had become an automatic response when entering a room. So, when I moved to my new apartment and the switch was on the right, I would automatically reach to the left and attempt to turn on the light before realizing that there was no switch on that wall. Thankfully, negative transfer is temporary and after a month or so I began instinctively turning to the right to turn on the light instead of turning to the left.

I’m just waiting until I go home for break and all of the light switches will be on the opposite wall and I have to overcome the cognitive confusion mind game all over again… ahh the joys of returning home.

I can recall quite clearly the pieces that I would perform for recitals, practicing them over and over until I had them nearly memorized. Of course, it wasn’t always the easiest learning them. I would have to slow down and take my time in order to play the right keys in the correct rhythm. However, once I had mastered this, my teacher would have me play at the designated pace of the song using a metronome. More often than not, this proved to be quite difficult at first because I was used to playing slower to ensure that I played the correct note. Naturally, the more I practiced while using the metronome, the easier it became, and, eventually, I was able to play a beautiful piece with little to no mistakes, all while keeping pace with the metronome.

The transition between playing a piece at a slower rate while accurately playing the notes to playing a piece at the correct rate and making mistakes refers to the speed- accuracy trade-off defined in Fitts’ Law. Fitts’ Law implies an inverse relationship between the difficulty of a movement and the speed with which it can be performed; meaning, we usually trade off speed in order to maintain accuracy. So, when my teacher asked me to play the piece at the pace of the metronome, she essentially asked me to complete my movements within a goal movement time while attempting to stay as accurate as possible with my movements, in this case, the notes I played. By increasing the speed at which the task needed to be performed, I decreased my accuracy, thus, an increase in the number of errors I made.

Luckily, errors can be fixed and mistakes can be corrected to yield a perfected piece that is recital ready!

Starting freshman year I memorized roughly 6 lists of 25 stems. Sophomore year we started over from list 1 and worked our way up to list 10. Once again, for my junior year we began from the beginning, covering lists 1-15. Finally, my senior year, the last year with the dreaded stem tests! Thankfully, we didn’t have any new lists to learn, but we started from the beginning (shocker) and worked our way up to list 15 once again.

Writing this I wonder how many of them I would be able to remember, almost want to find my old quizlet and test myself… almost. The point being, although I know I wouldn’t be able to recall all 375 of the stems I had memorized nearly four years ago, I do believe I could get at least half of them.

How might you ask? You see, I made flash cards, and quizlet sets, and played the games on quizlet, and wrote them down time and time again, doing everything I could to ensure that these stems would be stuck in my memory for eternity.

Eternity is a long time, but I suppose that makes sense because your long-term memory lasts for eternity. It’s interesting to think about, your brain has the capacity to take specific bits and pieces of information and consolidate them into your long-term memory where the storage capacity is limitless and where they last forever, or are at least considered relatively permanent. The only reason why you would “forget” something is due to retrieval problems, meaning that we don’t forget information that is stored in long term memory, we just struggle to access pieces of information at times, especially when those bits of information aren’t accessed often.

That’s why, while I was in high school, I would’ve been able to recall a majority of the 375 stems that I had learned. However, since I haven’t been asked to recall many of these  stems in nearly four years, I would find it much more difficult, impossible in some cases, to be able to define them despite the fact that they still linger in my long-term memory somewhere.