Growing up as the youngest of five children and the only sister to four older brothers, I had a lot of people to look up to, both literally and figuratively. Finally, with a girl in her life my mom excitedly enrolled me in a dance class. My one and only dance class that is. According detailed eye-witness recounts of the story, my three-year-old frame refused to participate. Later, when questioned by authorities, my bold three-year-old voice said, "I hate dance, I want to be like my brothers! I want to play hockey like they do and be better at it than them!". With the bribe of "you have to at least move for the next hour then we will sign you up for hockey weekend," I took shape. Knowing a good deal when I heard one, I stubbornly, yet obediently, stood in line with my little arms firmly crossed across my chest and ever so lightly "moved" my size two shoe up and down, and tapped offbeat.
 
 After that, my mom held true to her word and signed me up for hockey. Unbeknownst to me, my mother was actually teaching me a strong lesson. Year after year, second after second, I wanted to do whatever my brothers did whenever they did! Although every activity was not easy and did not directly apply to my true love of all things hockey, years down the line I figured out it all helped shape me. Sprinting up the court to chase down an unpredictably bouncing rubber ball in lacrosse, working as a team with a horse to successfully clear a jump, or anticipating where my opponent would smash a birdie in my court in badminton, all helped me learn new skills and taught me when to use them, even develop other skills so fluently I could complete them almost perfectly on my first try.

 

What I unknowingly was learning and applying was Schmidt’s Schema Theory. Day after day, I was forcing myself to learn new skills. According to Schema theory, I was learning to develop my Generalized Motor Programme by producing many different actions. I was also adjusting my new motor behaviours through Recall, having to decide what and when the correct decision movements were. Through all of these actions I was able to develop a strong sense of learning from my mistakes, or Recognition Schema.

 

Finally, no matter what sport I seemed to play as a kid I was often met with the question, “how did you do that?”, my simple response was “I dunno, I just seemed right.”. Now, I have learned that this ability is something characterized as a novel skill in Schema Theory. A novel skill is defined as “performers producing successful responses in situations they have never encountered,” (A Level PE, 2018). My mother forcing me to do some tasks I did not want to do while supporting me in my wanted endeavors, allowed me to develop these 3 category skills to become a developed human capable of producing novel skills! Thanks, mom!

 

Here is a picture of me around the age and time when I was put into dance. Could my smile be any more forced?

 

My entire life I have been the busy-bee. Always involved or into some kind of activity. Most of the time those activities were sports or sports related. I played: hockey, lacrosse, badminton, touch football, fastball, track and field, cross-country, basketball, handball. I rode equestrian, skied, snowboarded, water-skied, and wake boarded! If there was a team I was destined to be on it. While I thoroughly enjoyed every sport in the above list, I was most skilled and enjoyed hockey the most. As I got older my friends and teammates started to play and train for hockey all year round. I on the other hand, was still dabbling in every and any sport I could. The years passed, and the teams started to get more serious. My dad started to have to begin fielding the, “Why is she doing so much?” barrage again, only this time it was a little different. Parents and coaches started to worry that I was going to fall behind my peers in hockey talents and skill development. All of the talk even started to get to me, but my dad reassured me that playing other sports was healthy, kept things exciting, and his little secret, “playing other sports helps you get better at other sports, Wayne Gretzky did it, kid, just worry about having fun!”. 

 

What my dad taught me about during that time (other than sports are first and foremost about enjoyment) was Transfer of Learning. Transfer of Learning is defined as, the gain or loss of one skill as a result of practice on some other skill (Class Notes, 2018), or the Dad’s definition, “play this sport if you like it because it will help you with this other sport, trust me, kid”. My dedication to every other sport was just as important as my dedication to hockey. Take this example, in lacrosse you do not have skates. When you stop moving your feet, you stop moving. A lacrosse player must be working hard and moving the entire time otherwise they will not get anywhere and accomplish very little. Whereas, in hockey, when you skate as hard as you can, you can then coast and glide as far as that energy will take you. Anyone who watched me play hockey knew that I was one of the hardest working people on the ice. Coaches told me it was impressive how much I battled because my legs never stopped moving, so I outworked my opponents and won most battles. This example demonstrates Positive Transfer Learning, where a previous experience gives a beneficial effect to the learning and performance of an additional skill. Although the opposite of the above definition could also have true in the form of Negative Transfer Learning, it is about understanding that some skills could have been learned incorrectly as well had I only have been training for hockey. 

 

One final thought on transfer learning to highlight the importance of my above story is, Sport Specialization. Many of today’s youth are being forced or encouraged to play and train in only one sport in the hopes of receiving an NCAA scholarship or going professional in their sport. Studies are showing, that youth in “single-sport specialization are at risk of the potential for increased risk of injury and burnout,” (Orthop J Sports Med, 2017). This statistic lends to the fact that transfer learning might not only be something athletes are learning in performance skill development but also the transfer of learning that is happening at a deeper cellular level. How muscles develop and where the muscles develop, how the bones move with each other, and how they learn to move, twist, and bend are all factors that can potentially be related to our bodies learning even when we do not think they are or are not intentionally asking them to do!

 

Learning from his mistakes, and from his teachings when he felt like educating us, this oldest brother taught my other brothers and I about the memory storing process. All of the memories that I have, declarative or procedural, and the actions I made because of those are from observing and learning from my biggest brother. Even if I learned to do or not do something from observing a younger, older brother they most likely learned their demonstrated behavior from our oldest brother! Despite the memory storing process proving vital as a child when I watched and learned how to ask my parents and get a yes when wanting to hang out with friends, through the memory storing process my oldest brother taught me a much more valuable asset, learning to play the piano. Being the oldest, this brother in particular was most capable and enjoyed doing this task with me. Through the three steps of: encoding, storage, and retrieval I went from slamming on the keyboard to at least playing Mary Had a Little Lamb. Although because it is a lesson on memory this story is about my brother being able to remember what my mother taught him, so he could then teach his younger siblings. First to this process, required encoding to happen. My brother would have had to use his iconic and echoic registers in order to store the information in the active memory. From there, the "what to do" knowledge, Declarative Memory is needed before the “ability to do” knowledge, Procedural Memory can be stored and retrieved. Due to the fact that my brother was quite skilled at the piano he was so automatic in his play, his procedural memory was of no use to him when trying to teach me the skill. Despite there being some value to encoding and learning from procedural memory, in order to successfully teach me the new task he had to break down his playing experience even more. My brother taught me through his declarative memory to really break down how the hands need to work with the tempo to play. As the learner I needed to use my explicit memory, the memory that allows you to consciously remember while learning. While I only needed to use my explicit memory, my brother needed to use both his explicit and implicit memory, in order to consciously be able to remember skills while at the same time being able to demonstrate them to his little sister. Essentially, in order to show me how good he actually was at piano and that he knew some information about piano, he had to invoke his implicit memory.

Here is a picture of the family band learning to play piano.

 

One of the strengths I was praised for as a player was being able to read the play. I was so in tune with this “hockey sense” I knew what an opposing player would do before they would do it. Of course, as a kid this skill was not perfect, and it was in fact being hindered by some skills that needed to be improved. This “hockey sense” of being able to read plays and players instinctively, is directly connected to the teachings of visual search. However, as great as this skill was I knew it could be better, but I had to work on other tasks. As my skating got better, as my shot improved (see next post), my energy was able to be put into thinking and seeing the game, rather than wasting energy on skill all players have. I had many coaches, scouts, and parents tell me, this skill I had to see the play was not coachable. However, I tended to disagree. I knew how much work went into developing other skills, so I could have the energy needed to focus on my visual search because I recognized how important it was to the game of hockey. The saying of be one step ahead of the game will give you an advantage. Through continued practice of my visual search, my ability to see one step ahead of the game allowed me to be physically, one step ahead of the game. Through practice, I learned to watch another player’s hips to understand where they would go next, the placement of their hand on their shaft indicated whether they would shoot or pass, or even knowing that the eyes might look one way but, if the hands are pointed another the pass will actually go away from where they are looking. 

 

The next time my brother got to see me play, the visual search was my bread and butter. I came out of the locker room and he was smirking with a content look on his face. He then said to me, “finally, now you are hockey player, you SEE the game!”

That feeling when you know you killed it and the brother approves...

 

I should also mention this brother is also particularly dedicated to helping me. In this case, he was dedicated and determined to help his little sister with her slapshot! Growing up I have always been an athlete. When I meet people or family friends I do not recognize they always say, “oh and the little baby, girl McKeough, the hockey player”. Despite introducing myself as Stefanie my entire life, this was not a rare occasion for me. Growing up I was often times the only girl playing on a “boy’s” team. This lead to countless encounters of, “you’re the girl!”, “whoa, you are really good for a girl…”, or the one that leads us to our next story, “you shoot like this because you are a girl.”. Fact and point. True story. I had a coach tell me I had a poor shot because I was a girl, and it would never get better because I was girl, and girl’s could not shoot the puck. His suggestion was to resign ourselves to the fact that I would never shoot well so I better get used to passing the puck. To be fair, I did have a pretty horrible shot. My body just couldn’t figure it out. However, my coach needed a lesson in human movement as my shot was not bad because I was a girl, it was bad because my motor learning of this skill was! Needless to say, after a generous round of teasing, my dedicated big brother took me into the back yard and taught me how to take a slap shot! 

 

How did he do it? He broke it down, step by step. A lesson, over the course of many nights that would have made Fitts and Posner Proud. First, my brother explained the Cognitive stage of Fitts and Posner’s three stage model for motor learning. Fitts and Posner describe this as the stage that is mostly cognitive and verbal cues. He took my stick and puck away from me and told me to imagine what a slap shot looks like. How does a player’s body move? Where is the puck? What about the stick, how high does it go, where does it hit the ice? Why do these things matter? Do they matter? After I thought about this and explained to him what I thought was correct he kicked the puck back to me and shoved the stick in my direction, time for stage two. My brother then brought me through the Associative stage where I was able to develop my own motor pattern. Everything I had just thought about; how my body moves, how the stick must be aligned to the ice, where the puck needs to be in relation to my body, it was now time to execute. My brother coached me to go slowly through every single movement all the way through to hitting the puck. I broke down every movement from my head to my toes. From there we picked up speed all the way until I was able to successfully shoot at real speed. Once I started to get the hang of it my brother wanted to see if I could move onto the third stage of the model, the Autonomous stage. Perhaps out of boredom on his part, but this stage involved ensuring I did not have to actively think about my movements or any component and just shoot the puck! My brother’s creative approach to this was a constant threat of a nice tap to the shin or pretending to hit me and then not, to ensure I really was just going through the motions and the distractions caused by his “love taps” to my shins and ankles were not actually preventing me from completing the shot successfully and I was actually autonomously shooting the puck!

Needless to say, a couple of knuckle pucks made their way into the mix.

Of course, being the only girl to four older brothers meant there would inevitably be some individual-difference variables. The individual-difference variable that was consistently different between all of my brothers and myself was, gender. It was the one variable that truly set us all a part in how we biologically preferred to complete tasks. This proved especially true between my youngest brother and I as I was learning how to drive. My brother would take me out and say things like, “okay go east toward Whatevertown, then we will drive about 15 kilometres and follow that route west..”. Every single time, I would answer, “Okay so is that left, or right? 15 kilometres, so at that old school, and are we following the river along the park with the waterslides?”. He could never understand why I could not follow his directions and I could not understand why he was purposefully trying to confuse me. I simply chalked his directional jargon up to being a big brother that was trying to mess with me and make things hard for me because he thought it was harmless fun. His directions were; short, too cardinal, and lacking in visual cues for me to, pardon the pun, get the picture. According to Napoleon in her 2007 study her results found, “… it is clear that females outperformed males on the spatial task in all categories except references to cardinal directions. Females showed significantly higher references to right/left markers and topographical features; their directions were also longer and sorted into more steps,”. To further this point on gender variable differences, the same holds true for my brother and I to this day. Whether it is walking, driving, biking, whenever my brother and I are together we still manage to get frustrated with each other’s directions or choice in route. A couple of months ago, my brother was visiting me. Although I live in a city he has never been before, he was convinced he knew all the correct directions. Not only was his confidence so high he continued to use cardinal directions in his explanations as to why his directions would be fastest. Needless to say, I did not understand him and just resigned myself to the fact that he could be lead navigator for his visit. 

 

Despite growing up and wanting to be just like my brother in so many ways, this was one thing that no matter how hard I tried, I could never and will never be able to be just like him. Some individual-difference variables you just cannot shake!

Reading about Massed and Distributed Practice could have saved me a lot of pain and a quicker return to play. My attempt to amend the rehab plan from my therapist resulted in mass practice, “a practice schedule in which the amount of rest between practice sessions or trials is very short,” as opposed to the assigned distributed practice, “a practice schedule in which the amount of rest between practice sessions or trials is relatively long,” (Class Notes, 2018). Although I was able to get through the rehab sessions, I started to suffer from fatigue during the process due to its length and the overall strength of my injured area. Although I was able to figure this lesson out for myself all of those years ago, it was a lesson that could have been avoided had I have known about the benefits of distributed practice. 

It is good to know that I am not alone in my thinking of preferring to make my own schedule, and that that preferment was in mass distribution. In the Baddeley and Longman study their results showed, “although all trainees reported preferring their own training schedule, the trainees in the most massed group preferred their training schedule the most, whereas trainees in the most distributed group liked their schedule the least,” (1978). It is understood that learning is increased when it is spread out over longer periods as opposed to in mass. I am now curious as to how I would have reacted had I have been able to choose my own schedule. Would I have realized that the distributed practice was better for me and completed it throughout the day as was planned, without the defiance that occurred with me turning to mass learning?

I ended up returning to the distributed learning method and was back on the ice pain free in no time at all, as long as I stuck to the routine as prescribed. I will be honest, it made for a very exhausting year though. 

Below is a GIF of how I probably looked most days. 

 

Having sustained an injury that effected my eyes I quickly became a student of these terms. Doctors explained to me that the rapid jumping movements of eyes, known as saccades remained intact however my smooth pursuit and vergence were affected. My eyes were moving much slower than they should when following objects and skipping around, demonstrating to doctors that my smooth pursuit was injured. In part to this, I was also told my eyes were not working together anymore making it very difficult to focus on anything and playing into the issues with my smooth pursuit. In essence, my eyes were converging too much, not enough, or only eye was doing the work and overcompensating for the one eye that refused to put its fair share of work (lazy bugger!). Not having all of these three components of eye movement working effectively and efficiently together makes for a very interesting way to see (pun intended) the world.

 

Here is an example of my eyes converging and diverging while completing the Brock String portion of my evening eye exercises. Enjoy the close up!