Want to share a story? Well, it's more than a story. It's a study that seems hard to believe, but it's going to open up some possibilities. You probably haven't thought about after every 10 trials, one group of beginners was given the option of choosing between cutting with an orange, yellow, or white ball. And so someone can't the experimenter came to them after every 10 trials. And say, what would you like to use on the next 10 and they pick
the color? With another group of participants was yoked or or match to their counterpart in the other group. So if their counterpart had chosen, the yellow balls for that tend to set of Trials, then the yoked performer, who didn't have a choice was simply given the yellow balls to work with for those 10 trials. And some people stayed with their colors throughout, they had six opportunities to choose which set of which color Also, they wanted every 10 trials and other people mixed it up.
So there was no Rhyme or Reason to the choices per se but the opportunity for Choice six times versus no times seem to be important because the group that had the choice of balls. And actually there is no known connection between the color of the ball and how well people cut some golf company's might might want to create that impression. That color makes a Prince, but certainly not in cutting where you don't have something happening very quickly in any event.
There was no relationship in our study either between the color that was chosen and success of the putt. But what we found is that the group that have the choices, no matter what, they chose did better when they came back for their retention test. So they have higher accuracy scores when they came back. The next day. This is just one aspect. Does motivational learning. And today, we're going to be talking about two things. Number one, the role of positivity and confidence for
Effective learning. And number two, the need to be autonomous or have some choice in the learning process. Welcome to the gulf science lab, a place for you to learn what's truly going on in the world of golf research so that you can take these insights and improve your game. I'm excited to have. You here is some of the research and techniques that were going to talk about today.
Have truly, really surprised me and I'm excited to dive into this seventh episode in our first season on motor learning. If you haven't heard, we're hosting the first ever virtual Summit on motor learning and golf. I'm Really excited about if you want to learn as much as possible about the topic of learning practice and performance. You want to check this out. We're going to have a presentation from some of the best in the business. Everyone from dr.
Tim Lee Trent Werner. Dr. Brett McCabe of the mine side. Adam Young Matthew Cooke and many more go over to motor. Learning lab.com. That's motor learning lab.com. Check it out quickly as the early bird, tickets are only available until November 1st. That is November 1st. It's coming up quickly. So head over there and check those out. Now. We're going to dive into two concepts today. Anything you can do as an instructor to make people feel more confident or increase.
Their self-efficacy is beneficial for performance and for golfers can relate to that. If you're not confident, you're not going to hit the ball. Well, and some many Studies have shown that confidence or self. Because it's really critical for Optimal Performance and learning the other motivational variable. That is also very powerful is learner, autonomy. So, practice conditions, that involve choices or just a choice and that support people's need for autonomy, a really
beneficial. In the intro, we talked a little bit about autonomy in the positive impacts. The choices can have on learning in the voice. You heard was dr. Rebecca lewthwaite, Rebecca Lee played and I'm a researcher in the area of the effects of motivation on motor learning which has implications for athletes coaches as well as physical therapists and patients. Because when we pair, Nation with the need or opportunity to learn.
The learning is better. And our other guest for today is dr. Gabrielle wolf. My name is Gabrielle wolf. I'm a professor of kinesiology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. And I study motor learning. I want to dive into this concept of autonomy, and choice, has a bit deeper the general premise being. If you give the learner Choice, their attention of that task is longer in layman's terms. You know, you'll remember how to hit that flap shot better next
week. And not just today, the choices you give the learner don't even have to be related to the task. So you can give them an unrelated Choice such as which picture. Should we hang in our lab? And they will learn better. So it sounds kind of crazy but evilly, unrelated choices. You give people support their need for autonomy and Enhance their learning. And that's what we heard in the intro story about the color of golf balls. This Simple Choice.
Improve the effectiveness of learning people like having choices. And so, there's also an affective component here that helps people learn positive effect, turns out to be very important for learning tends to release dopamine, which is critical for learning. So I think it's two things that play a role here, one being self-efficacy or confidence, being enhanced and the other being the positive affect, the positive emotions that are associated with having a choice. So practically.
What should you change in your everyday actions? Because of this simple Insight? First of all, whenever I teach or ask somebody who's a learner, they're trying something. I always By asking not telling. So I find some some small thing. And this is part of what this describes to me is that it doesn't have to be something major that you ask someone
about. Although people have asked, I think pretty significant things given choices about very significant things and surprisingly, sometimes even things that you think are counterintuitive to learning, for example, fewer practice trials, rather than more. People who got to choose and choose fewer. Actually better than people who were, who had more practice trials, but no choice, for example, so small things matter, and doesn't always have to be about the specific task.
You're looking at, but think of it, as a little bit bigger picture you walk in. You're working with somebody, you think about how can I provide a little support for this person's autonomy, so I might ask him. What kind of thing do you think? Best in practice for you yesterday, or I might say to somebody who's trying to regain Mobility after a stroke. So which feels better to you to move with your right leg first, or your left leg when you're
going up the stairs? So I just engage them and saying, you know, you're definitely collaborative. Partner in this story. I'm not going to impose anything, but you have insights. You're the only one with some of these insights that. That can offer them. So, when we, what are you thinking about it? Okay, let's try that. So I'll so you'll hear the language of autonomy. Support is not about, I want you to do something. It's about, let's do this thing together. So it's we not die and there.
No must should have twos in the in the conversation. It's more about presenting things that you think will be beneficial but having legal. In terms of which way to go with them. The language of autonomy, support is about, let's do this together and I think that phrase really sums it up. That's really what the teacher and Coach is someone there to work with the student in their
growth and progression. Not trying to force them into any certain way, but supporting this concept really makes sense. And if you're a teacher coach, you've probably seen this play out along with this next aspect of motivational learning. We're going to talk about. We used to think that It was sort of a temporary influence on performance.
So if you had some positive and sometimes people even thought about negative motivation to do something that this sort of energized, you two to perform better. But now we think that actually pairing up positive, motivational factors with Early Learning, enhances the learning. So when we see two groups of people and one, Group, simply, for example, gets information about their score on a given trial of a motor task and the other group gets not only their
score on that trial. But some sense that they're doing well relative others or relative to their own Improvement. When they get the add additional sense of success, they do better than simply getting a score. Or so, it's sort of a sense that hey, I'm, I'm not bad at this. I can do this and that seems to potentiate their learning. And when we come back a day later, they have actually retained more of what they learn the first day or if you transfer to another somewhat related tasks.
They also do better at that than people who didn't get that F additional boost of the sense of success. I love this positive. Create Better Learning is something you might have gaster. Even things a little too obvious or childish. Whatever it is. You should change that thought because we're talking about better results and we're talking about Improvement that is retained. Yes, that's it. Sort of finding finding the positive. Looking at the glass is half full and sometimes.
You need a coach to help you with that. Sometimes people can do it themselves depending on the skill, involve a task involved, but But yes, finding the positive, for example, they've been a few studies that looked at how people define success. There was a study of its impressed but not yet published by Palmer and colleagues.
And what they did is it was a golf putting task for novices and they had to Target circles on the mat the gulf cutting mat and the Actual Target like golf hole like Target in the middle of those, two concentric circles and one group. They told them that you should consider hit a good putt. If you get the ball within the smaller circle around the Target, and the other group, they told you should consider it
a success. If you get your ball within this larger Circle. So blue and red circles, the large Circle Group, interestingly enough. Did better. Learn the task better than the group that had the smaller Target even though both were actually putting to the same Target hole. So, in a way, how you define success means people derive a sense of success and this has implications for how you'll
learn. So if you it's important that you interpret, the behavior, the action, this the performance, so that the state can be Spinner in a positive light and you know, I think this has implications for coaches and teachers if they get to hypercritical too fast, then there is this dampening of the learning effect. So it pays to accentuate the positive and also to invite which is connect connect to the next topic is there. Really several ways.
You can go about creating this this positive motivational opportunity and one is to enhance the sense. That one's been successful as you go forward. And the other is to provide people with opportunities to choose or to have autonomy in their actions. So, one way you could pair these things is tell people early on, it's quite good. If you can hit this target or be close to it in this Way, provide them with positive feedback, you, you know, for that earlier trial.
It was excellent, you know, and then the next thing you say, let me know when you'd like to get some more specific feedback. So it's an invitation to have to take a little charge of when you get further detail or when you dive into it, deeply more deeply. It's all about perception in, how you perceive success of coincident, timing. For people at the Press a button. When the LED light came, which was speeding down, a Runway came to the Target area and people who had a larger Zone to
consider it successful. So it's 30 milliseconds instead of 4 Ms. Did better at the task and learned it better. So the next day when they came back, they were better able to perform the task, then they had a very small zone of four milliseconds and one. One thing that became apparent, was that the group that had the four milliseconds own, they ended up having only I think six percent of the trials that were
in that zone. So they came away from that experience thinking I'm not hitting the target very often. Whereas the other group with the larger Zone ended up within that zone about 58 percent of the time. So they had a much more significant. History of feeling successful on the task. So those a lie to them aware of where this issue of the definition of success has been examined directly like this, but the implications of it are that we need to consider that.
It's important that people experience early success as they learn, this is not sort of an experiential issue. It might be something whereby the the organization of the nervous, system provides some enhancement to learning when you have pairing it with something that creates a positive motivational kind of experience. So it's really look for the positive. Find something positive. Don't start, sort of deploying the standards of an expert when someone is in the stage of learning.
So if you're trying to break 90, don't be comparing yourself to a PGA Tour player stats, you're not going to be confident and it's negatively going to impact your learning and performance. But you know, one fact that I found crazy. So what if we compared the - the neutral and the positive response and this honestly is a little scary if you think about in most cultures to hide the emotions and believe that being
overly, positive is bad somehow. We have done an several experiments where we first started out, saying. Well, we don't really know. Is it that - is a detriment to Performance or that positive is a benefit for what. So, when we have three groups group that receives say negative feedback or no feedback or positive feedback. So, we have a control group and a negative positive.
What what typically happens is that the negative feedback group for example, people who might believe that they're doing worse than their peers and the group that gets no additional information, but their own performance information, those groups, typically look like each other whereas the group that receives a sense of success or progress or competence that group tends to look different than those other two, so we're not the first to think maybe it is positive and Not what happens
on the negative side, that's really affecting it, but I think that the jury's still out on that so I wouldn't give - unless it was asked for. So if someone said to me, okay, I know I'm doing generally well, but I really want to know. What could I change to, you know, make a difference. I would be, I would observe what I could about. What I thought would be helpful to them. It wouldn't be negative in the sense of punitive, or in the sense of an angry tone or anything that I would.
The way, but I would just simply say, well, I think maybe if you think about, you know, extending your arms a bit more, I would actually do it in a external attentional, Focus way, think about, you know, pointing The Club at the target for the end of the Swing. Then that would be, you know, information about how to do that task better, but it would be done in a way where they asked for it. They were ready for it and you simply gave them away to become.
More competent. So, that's kind of some Studies have shown that the - doesn't appear to detract so much as the positive appears to enhance. So, let's make a change. Well, I think one thing, I've become much more conscious of not having a sort of neutral tone two things to definitely try to celebrate. When someone has small victories to point out to them what they did that they didn't even know they did. Well, Highlight the things people do well to enhance their confidence.
And also give them autonomy and induce an external Focus. That last Point external Focus. Well, you'll just have to tune in next week to learn more about that. Thank you so much the dr. Wolf and doctor this way for sharing with us. Make sure to check out the upcoming motor learning Summit AT motor learning. Lab.com. This episode is hosted in written by me 40 Walker. You can follow me on Twitter at Cordy Walker. Make sure to find us on. On iTunes or Stitcher And subscribe to the podcast.
This was edited mixed and produced by just hit publish Productions, and we will see you all next time on the golf science lab.