I have done color guard for 6 years; color guard is the name for the flags with marching bands. I never put any thought into exactly how I was remembering everything and why different techniques for practice worked better than others. I just thought about how different practices we had could have helped us better remember the show we performed. Or how practices changed in what exactly we focused on as the season went on. The different moves and techniques we used are all part of procedural memory. While they had to be encoded into LTM and the ways in which they occurred changed as I advanced to different levels of color guard. We actually had higher levels of processing the moves and put more thought into them.
In the earliest form at my high school it was very low levels of processing just constant repetition after repetition to counts and not the music we performed to. We constantly used counts (1,2,3,4…) to correct any mistakes make any changes and everything instead of the music we were to recall the actions to. The retrieval cues were not the same as the external stimulus at the time of encoding. We were also supposed to express some emotion during performances; however we never practiced that outside of performances. So, we did not have a similar internal state at encoding and retrieval. Overtime, we constant rehearsal consolidation did occur usually just in time for finals after weeks of practice. Things were different went I joined a higher level of color guard.
While, we did learn the different moves to counts at first but we did it in small parts and applied it to the pieces of accompanied music that the work went with every time we went over new things. Due to encoding specificity we more easily recalled the information during performances due to the similarities of external stimuli at encoding and retrieval. We also were also told to express the proper emotions needed in our performances while we were practicing our work with the music. This is relevant to state-dependent learning since the internal state at encoding was (should have been) similar to the internal state of retrieval. With all of these similarities at encoding and retrieval the performance was better and easier, although it was actually more challenging moves, from my higher levels of color guard than for my last year of doing it in high school.
Sources
Goldstein, E. B. (2011). Cognitive Psychology Connecting Mind, Research, and Everyday Experience. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
I really enjoyed reading your post. The reason I found it to be so interesting was because, as I read I began to relate to your experience. I was also in the color guard for a little while, while I was in the Navy. As I read your post I started thinking about the constant repetitions and tedious movements. The only thing we were incapable of doing were the facial expressions to show emotion. Being that it was the military they tend to be very strict when it comes to those type of things especially when marching. When you began to talk about remembering information during the performance versus remembering or encoding movements or information during practices, I can see how you are able to identify it with encoding specificity. Although our movements were contextually based on the music and our ability to rely on specific counts (1,2,3,4) repeating each and every count over and over again we still had to rely on our own ability to perceive and retrieve it based on our prior knowledge.
When we are able to be efficient in our abilities to use proper procedural techniques, in order to encode information from what we already know, this makes understanding the different movements and repetitions that it takes to get the job done a lot easier. Context dependent memory also plays apart as well, this is because when we loose or misplace something we tend to try to retrace our steps, knowing it has to show up, especially if we know we placed whatever we lost in a known place. I used loosing something as an example, because when that normally happens our natural impulse is to look in the places we may have been last. When practicing in the color guard, sometimes movements are forgotten, this is when we try to retrace our movements from the most recent to the present in order to remember definitive movements which were present at the time of encoding being that, that information is the same at time of retrieval. Last but not least I would like to touch upon the role music played in marching in the color guard. I read a article on Music, Mood and Memory and this part popped out most, from a cognitive point of view, background music is important mainly because it forms part of the environmental context in which stimuli are processed. In accordance with the notion of context-dependent memory (Smith, Glenberg, & Bjork, 1978) and the principle of encoding specificity (Tulving & Thomson, 1973). I just though that was a cool read, and really can appreciate how our environment plays such a big part in developing the stimuli which are needed to be retrieved to complete the process of encoding specificity.
“Http://www.escom.org/proceedings/ICMPC2000/Thurs/Richards.” (n.d.): n. pag. Web.
Goldstein, E. B. (2011). Cognitive Psychology Connecting Mind, Research, and Everyday Experience. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
I really enjoyed reading your post. The reason I found it to be so interesting was because, as I read I began to relate to your experience. I was also in the color guard for a little while, while I was in the Navy. As I read your post I started thinking about the constant repetitions and tedious movements. The only thing we were incapable of doing was the facial expressions to show emotion, being that it was the military they tend to be very strict when it comes to those type of things especially when marching.