The Episodic Buffer, Essay Example

Studies have shown that short training sessions are likely to produce greater skills than training sessions of the same total duration that make use of longer sessions. Therefore, it is possible to optimize training schedules based on this knowledge in order to generate more effective results. It is important to provide training to people both effectively and efficiently. For example, some studies show that it is more realistic to allow people to work part-time jobs because they are more productive in small spurts of time. In particular, the British Postal Service found that they would need to teach more than 10,000 employees how to type (Baddeley & Longman, 1978). It was determined that training sessions are the most feasible if the lengths of training sessions occurred over one or two hours with a frequency of at least two sessions per day. It will therefore be beneficial to determine whether training individuals for one hour per day for five consecutive days or 20 minutes per day for 15 consecutive days would be more beneficial to help them train to achieve in Wii bowling. It is hypothesized that practice over a longer period of time will be more practical for achieving high scores.

Procedure

Eight participants will randomly be selected for the research study. Four individuals will be randomized to the experimental group that will practice one hour per day for five consecutive days (group 1). Four individuals will be randomized to a second experimental group that will practice 20 minutes per day for 15 consecutive days (group 2). Participants will be asked to train on their own for the allotted times for five days in a row. They will be asked to keep track of the time and duration of training on a log provided to them. They will also be asked to record their score for each session. On the first day after the training sessions for each team, participants will play Wii bowling to determine who has the highest cumulative score. Each group will play Wii bowling three times. This will be repeated one week following the last training session as well. Additional analysis will be done to calculate the mean, median, mode, and standard deviation of scores for the two teams. Furthermore, a student’s t-test will be conducted to determine whether there is statistically significant variance between the two groups. A variation will be held as statistically significant if the p-value is found to be less than 0.05.

Results

Table 1: Summary of results for group 1 and group 2 during the first and second follow up trials.

Table 1 demonstrates that study participants consistently performed better the first time they were asked to play Wii bowling after the training period. Furthermore, the mean, median, and mode score of the second group (20 minutes per day for 15 consecutive days) was found to be higher than the scores received by the first group (one hour per day for five consecutive days) in all instances. The student’s t–test demonstrated that the difference between scores for both groups on both follow up tests is statistically significant, demonstrating that the score received by the second group was truly better than the score received by the first group.

Discussion

Based on the results obtained from this experiment, it appears that it is more beneficial to practice for a shorter period of time each day over a longer time overall. Because individuals that practice this way are required to constantly recall the skills that they are working to develop, this method is more beneficial to building muscle memory and related skills that pertain to Wii bowling (Baddeley, 2000). None of the participants that were enrolled in this study have played Wii bowling previously, so none were at a significant advantage compared to the other players. Students can apply this understanding during their own practice. Whether they are studying or training for sports, it is valuable to practice a developing skill for at least 20 minutes each day.

Overall, the results achieved were expected based on existing experimental data. Studying daily for a long period of time helps facilitate a long-term memory of the information being absorbed (Nicolic et al., 2007). In the future, it would be beneficial to repeat this experiment using a larger group of participants. Since a small sample size was used, it is possible that some of the scores received were due to chance instead of skill. Some aspects of chance were minimized by randomly assigning participants to groups, but additional modifications could be made in the future to ensure that the results will be more reflective of the overall population. However, it is expected that the information generated is internally valid and can be applied directly to the individuals that were involved in this experiment.

References

Baddeley, A. (2000). The episodic buffer: a new component of working memory? Trends Cogn. Sci., 4(11): 417–423.

Baddeley, A., & Longman, D. (1978). The Influence of Length and Frequency of Training Session on the Rate of Learning to Type. Ergonomics, 21(8): 627-635.

Nikoli?, D.; Singer, W. (2007). Creation of visual long-term memory. Perception & Psychophysics, 69(6): 904–912.