Showing posts with label motor skills. Show all posts
Showing posts with label motor skills. Show all posts
Thursday, September 24, 2015
Monday, February 9, 2015
Want to learn a new skill more effectively? Stop thinking about yourself!
Does this also apply to our stroke exercises? Do your protocols need to change based on this?
http://digest.bps.org.uk/2015/02/want-to-learn-new-skill-more.html
The human mind can be its own worst enemy. When we want to do well in sports, we often intensify attentional focus on bodily movements that are best off left on automatic pilot. The result, even for elite athletes, can be a dire instance of choking. The muscles stiffen or shake. Fluid, expert movement is lost, and the learning of new skills is impaired.
A common assumption is that an internal focus is harmful to performance because it directs unhelpful conscious attention to bodily control. But what if the costs of self-focus are more general and profound than that? Perhaps merely thinking about ourselves in any way is harmful to performance and learning because to do so activates the "self-schema".
The self-schema is "more than a philosophical construct" argue Brad McKay and his colleagues in a new paper, it is in fact a "functional neural network located anatomically in cortical midline structures." Their theory is that anything that activates this network - be that over-focus on bodily movements, memories of past performance, or the scrutiny of an audience - will be detrimental to skilled performance and learning.
The researchers began by dividing 36 students (26 men) into two groups and asking them to throw 10 balls underarm at a bulls-eye style target. Throws nearer the target earned more points. Both groups performed equally well. Now one group spent a minute "thinking about their previous throwing experience including their strengths and weaknesses as a thrower"; the other group acted as controls and just waited out the time. Both groups then performed 10 more throws. The students who'd spent time thinking about themselves showed inferior performance compared with their earlier standard; the control group maintained their skill level.
Over two practice days, all the students completed a writing task in the various short breaks between hitting. Those in the self-reflective group wrote for one minute either about their experience at baseball; their personal attributes as an athlete; their emotional experiences related to baseball; or their strengths and weaknesses as a hitter (all the different topics were covered during the different breaks). The other group acted as controls - they spent the same breaks writing about objects in the laboratory where the training took place, either focusing on colours or shapes or the names of the objects.
A few days later, the students had a final go at the ball hitting challenge. Adjusting for initial performance differences, the control group significantly outperformed the self-reflective group. The control group also outperformed the self-reflective group when the task was changed slightly by speeding up the delivery of the balls.
McKay and his team said their results were surprising - as one of their participants remarked, you'd think spending time writing about one's past glory days at baseball would have provided a confidence boost, and maybe rekindled old movement patterns too. Instead, the researchers said their results showed how the "ostensibly innocuous activity of contemplating one's own experiences, emotions, strengths, weaknesses and attributes, might have activated a lurking neural self-network that interfered with the process of motor learning."
Critics may feel this study raises as many questions as it answers - with no measures of muscle tension, or mood, or a myriad other possible mediating factors, we're left in the dark about why writing about the self appeared to be detrimental to motor skill learning.
However, the researchers believe their study has broken new ground. Where previous research has shown instructions to focus on parts of the body can be harmful to performance, McKay and his team said their "experiments are the first to show that self-reflection alone is sufficient to interfere with motor skill activation and performance."
_________________________________
McKay, B., Wulf, G., Lewthwaite, R., & Nordin, A. (2015). The self: Your own worst enemy? A test of the self-invoking trigger hypothesis The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1-10 DOI: 10.1080/17470218.2014.997765
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
http://digest.bps.org.uk/2015/02/want-to-learn-new-skill-more.html
The human mind can be its own worst enemy. When we want to do well in sports, we often intensify attentional focus on bodily movements that are best off left on automatic pilot. The result, even for elite athletes, can be a dire instance of choking. The muscles stiffen or shake. Fluid, expert movement is lost, and the learning of new skills is impaired.
A common assumption is that an internal focus is harmful to performance because it directs unhelpful conscious attention to bodily control. But what if the costs of self-focus are more general and profound than that? Perhaps merely thinking about ourselves in any way is harmful to performance and learning because to do so activates the "self-schema".
The self-schema is "more than a philosophical construct" argue Brad McKay and his colleagues in a new paper, it is in fact a "functional neural network located anatomically in cortical midline structures." Their theory is that anything that activates this network - be that over-focus on bodily movements, memories of past performance, or the scrutiny of an audience - will be detrimental to skilled performance and learning.
The researchers began by dividing 36 students (26 men) into two groups and asking them to throw 10 balls underarm at a bulls-eye style target. Throws nearer the target earned more points. Both groups performed equally well. Now one group spent a minute "thinking about their previous throwing experience including their strengths and weaknesses as a thrower"; the other group acted as controls and just waited out the time. Both groups then performed 10 more throws. The students who'd spent time thinking about themselves showed inferior performance compared with their earlier standard; the control group maintained their skill level.
"A simple manipulation designed to activate the self-schema ... was sufficient to degrade performance," the researchers said.Next, 37 more students were recruited (18 women) and split into two groups. They spent time practising using a bat to hit golf-ball-sized balls, travelling at 25mph, at a target. None of them had played organised baseball or softball in the last year.
Over two practice days, all the students completed a writing task in the various short breaks between hitting. Those in the self-reflective group wrote for one minute either about their experience at baseball; their personal attributes as an athlete; their emotional experiences related to baseball; or their strengths and weaknesses as a hitter (all the different topics were covered during the different breaks). The other group acted as controls - they spent the same breaks writing about objects in the laboratory where the training took place, either focusing on colours or shapes or the names of the objects.
A few days later, the students had a final go at the ball hitting challenge. Adjusting for initial performance differences, the control group significantly outperformed the self-reflective group. The control group also outperformed the self-reflective group when the task was changed slightly by speeding up the delivery of the balls.
McKay and his team said their results were surprising - as one of their participants remarked, you'd think spending time writing about one's past glory days at baseball would have provided a confidence boost, and maybe rekindled old movement patterns too. Instead, the researchers said their results showed how the "ostensibly innocuous activity of contemplating one's own experiences, emotions, strengths, weaknesses and attributes, might have activated a lurking neural self-network that interfered with the process of motor learning."
Critics may feel this study raises as many questions as it answers - with no measures of muscle tension, or mood, or a myriad other possible mediating factors, we're left in the dark about why writing about the self appeared to be detrimental to motor skill learning.
However, the researchers believe their study has broken new ground. Where previous research has shown instructions to focus on parts of the body can be harmful to performance, McKay and his team said their "experiments are the first to show that self-reflection alone is sufficient to interfere with motor skill activation and performance."
_________________________________
McKay, B., Wulf, G., Lewthwaite, R., & Nordin, A. (2015). The self: Your own worst enemy? A test of the self-invoking trigger hypothesis The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1-10 DOI: 10.1080/17470218.2014.997765
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
Wednesday, January 22, 2014
Using action observation to study superior motor performance: a pilot fMRI study
Does your hospital/clinic have 120 videos of each type of action observation you want to recover? Why not, they've had 20 years to create them?
http://www.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00819/full?
Carl-Johan Olsson1,2* and
Peter Lundström2
Full article at the link after you realize your doctor is doing nothing on this.
http://www.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00819/full?
Carl-Johan Olsson1,2* and
Peter Lundström2
- 1Ageing and Living Conditions Programme, Centre for Population Studies, Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden
- 2Umeå centre for Functional Brain Imaging, Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden
Full article at the link after you realize your doctor is doing nothing on this.
Wednesday, November 21, 2012
Hand-Clapping Songs Improve Motor and Cognitive Skills, Research Shows
I would love to be able to clap my hands to improve my cognitive and motor skills. Has your therapist been trained for this? What is the coding for reimbursement for this ADL? But first I need the spasticity in my fingers gone. And you'd get double benefit from the music.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/04/100428090954.htm
A researcher at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) conducted the first study of hand-clapping songs, revealing a direct link between those activities and the development of important skills in children and young adults, including university students.
"We found that children in the first, second and third grades who
sing these songs demonstrate skills absent in children who don't take
part in similar activities," explains Dr. Idit Sulkin a member of BGU's
Music Science Lab in the Department of the Arts. "We also found that
children who spontaneously perform hand-clapping songs in the yard
during recess have neater handwriting, write better and make fewer
spelling errors."
Dr. Warren Brodsky, the music psychologist who supervised her doctoral dissertation, said Sulkin's findings lead to the presumption that "children who don't participate in such games may be more at risk for developmental learning problems like dyslexia and dyscalculia. There's no doubt such activities train the brain and influence development in other areas. The children's teachers also believe that social integration is better for these children than those who don't take part in these songs."
As part of the study, Sulkin went to several elementary school classrooms and engaged the children in either a board of education sanctioned music appreciation program or hand-clapping songs training -- each lasting a period of 10 weeks.
"Within a very short period of time, the children who until then hadn't taken part in such activities caught up in their cognitive abilities to those who did," she said. But this finding only surfaced for the group of children undergoing hand-clapping songs training. The result led Sulkin to conclude that hand-clapping songs should be made an integral part of education for children aged six to 10, for the purpose of motor and cognitive training.
During the study, "Impact of Hand-clapping Songs on Cognitive and Motor Tasks," Dr. Sulkin interviewed school and kindergarten teachers, visited their classrooms and joined the children in singing. Her original goal, as part of her thesis, was to figure out why children are fascinated by singing and clapping up until the end of third grade, when these pastimes are abruptly abandoned and replaced with sports.
"This fact explains a developmental process the children are going through," Dr. Sulkin observes. "The hand-clapping songs appear naturally in children's lives around the age of seven, and disappear around the age of 10. In this narrow window, these activities serve as a developmental platform to enhance children's needs -- emotional, sociological, physiological and cognitive. It's a transition stage that leads them to the next phases of growing up."
Sulkin says that no in-depth, long-term study has been conducted on the effects that hand-clapping songs have on children's motor and cognitive skills. However, the relationship between music and intellectual development in children has been studied extensively, prompting countless parents to obtain a "Baby Mozart" CD for their children.
This study also demonstrates that listening to 10 minutes of Mozart music (.i.e., the 'Mozart Effect') does not improve spatial task performance more than 10 minutes hand clapping songs training or 10 minutes exposure to silence.
Sulkin also found that hand-clapping song activity has a positive effect on adults: University students who filled out her questionnaires reported that after taking up such games, they became more focused and less tense. "These techniques are associated with childhood, and many adults treat them as a joke," she said. "But once they start clapping, they report feeling more alert and in a better mood."
Sulkin grew up in a musical home. Her father, Dr. Adi Sulkin, is a well-known music educator who, in the 1970s and 1980s, recorded and published over 50 cassettes and videos depicting Israeli children's play-songs, street-songs, holiday and seasonal songs, and singing games targeting academic skills.
"So quite apart from the research experience, working on this was like a second childhood," she noted.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/04/100428090954.htm
A researcher at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) conducted the first study of hand-clapping songs, revealing a direct link between those activities and the development of important skills in children and young adults, including university students.
Dr. Warren Brodsky, the music psychologist who supervised her doctoral dissertation, said Sulkin's findings lead to the presumption that "children who don't participate in such games may be more at risk for developmental learning problems like dyslexia and dyscalculia. There's no doubt such activities train the brain and influence development in other areas. The children's teachers also believe that social integration is better for these children than those who don't take part in these songs."
As part of the study, Sulkin went to several elementary school classrooms and engaged the children in either a board of education sanctioned music appreciation program or hand-clapping songs training -- each lasting a period of 10 weeks.
"Within a very short period of time, the children who until then hadn't taken part in such activities caught up in their cognitive abilities to those who did," she said. But this finding only surfaced for the group of children undergoing hand-clapping songs training. The result led Sulkin to conclude that hand-clapping songs should be made an integral part of education for children aged six to 10, for the purpose of motor and cognitive training.
During the study, "Impact of Hand-clapping Songs on Cognitive and Motor Tasks," Dr. Sulkin interviewed school and kindergarten teachers, visited their classrooms and joined the children in singing. Her original goal, as part of her thesis, was to figure out why children are fascinated by singing and clapping up until the end of third grade, when these pastimes are abruptly abandoned and replaced with sports.
"This fact explains a developmental process the children are going through," Dr. Sulkin observes. "The hand-clapping songs appear naturally in children's lives around the age of seven, and disappear around the age of 10. In this narrow window, these activities serve as a developmental platform to enhance children's needs -- emotional, sociological, physiological and cognitive. It's a transition stage that leads them to the next phases of growing up."
Sulkin says that no in-depth, long-term study has been conducted on the effects that hand-clapping songs have on children's motor and cognitive skills. However, the relationship between music and intellectual development in children has been studied extensively, prompting countless parents to obtain a "Baby Mozart" CD for their children.
This study also demonstrates that listening to 10 minutes of Mozart music (.i.e., the 'Mozart Effect') does not improve spatial task performance more than 10 minutes hand clapping songs training or 10 minutes exposure to silence.
Sulkin also found that hand-clapping song activity has a positive effect on adults: University students who filled out her questionnaires reported that after taking up such games, they became more focused and less tense. "These techniques are associated with childhood, and many adults treat them as a joke," she said. "But once they start clapping, they report feeling more alert and in a better mood."
Sulkin grew up in a musical home. Her father, Dr. Adi Sulkin, is a well-known music educator who, in the 1970s and 1980s, recorded and published over 50 cassettes and videos depicting Israeli children's play-songs, street-songs, holiday and seasonal songs, and singing games targeting academic skills.
"So quite apart from the research experience, working on this was like a second childhood," she noted.
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