Why do we do what we do? This is one question that summarizes the motive for psychology. The answer to this question is the reason why I declared psychology as my major. Current psychologists and those dating back to the year 1879, strove to achieve the answer to this reoccurring question. “The Father of Psychology”, Wilhelm Wundt, and those psychologists of-age, have been strenuously consulting and researching to truly understand the mind and its effect on human behavior. Over the last 127 years, an accumulation of various answers to that specific question have been made. In this paper, the main focus will be the working memory in athletics; how the conscious movements become unconscious and almost instinct-like, and how coaches can teach their athletes better, using explicit and implicit technique.
The mind is very complex and the slightest thing can dramatically change a person. At the same time, the mind can be molded how it is told to. This infers that one with the correct knowledge can change another however they please which is very beneficial to coaches in athletics.
According to Baddeley, in 1986, there is a diagram called The Working Memory Model. The definition of working memory is the part of short-term memory that is concerned with immediate conscious perceptual and linguistic processing. In a sense, working memory is the process of consciously memorizing whatever one is focused upon, only being held for a short amount of time. One will not retain this information long, unless it is rehearsed enough to where it will be placed in long term memory. According to Rich Master author of “The Oxford Handbook of Sport and Performance Psychology”, “Working memory processes data via a central executive that directs attention, and subsidiary systems that temporarily code, order, and rehearse verbal and acoustic-related information (the phonological loop); holds visual, spatial, and kinesthetic components of information (the visuospatial sketchpad); and integrate information from different sources by interfacing between the subsidiary system and long-term memory (the episodic buffer).” (Masters, 132) This explains the process and the elements to the conscious processing paradigm done by Baddeley in 1986.
The first major question to be asked is, in athletics can a movement just like school, work, or daily life data, be rehearsed enough that the memory of the movement can be put into long term memory? Looking at just the function of baddeley’s paradigm once the movement (sensory memory) gets to the central executive. Now from there information gets pulled either to the phonological loop (which generally is verbal/auditory info) or into the visuospatial sketchpad (which is all the visual/spatial). For example information goes back and forth from the central executive and either phonological loop or visuospatial sketchpad and develops into long term memory. Now in sports, the athletes are told what to do and how to do it, which automatically puts...