In theory, piñatas are terrific fun.
I mean, what’s not to like? Put a bunch of yummy treats in an animal-shaped box, hang it up, and let a group of blindfolded kids swing wildly at it with a stick? Good times!
Of course, the reality of piñatas is never quite as exciting as one might hope.
It’s mostly a bunch of weak tentative hits, glancing blows, and complete misses. And then the host parent tries to smash it open, hitting it over and over with increasing frustration until they finally tear the thing open by hand.
A similar thing can also happen in the practice room. We miss a note, so we stop, and take another swing at it to see if the second time’s the charm. And if not, we keep swinging away at it, faster and faster, until we finally hear what we want, and move on to the next thing.
This piñata approach to practicing often does lead to the desired result – but it comes at a cost.
After all, you’ve just played the passage incorrectly a bunch of times, and correctly only once. That’s a pretty underwhelming correct-to-incorrect ratio. And what it really means, is that you’ve had far more practice doing it wrong than doing it right (read this for a quick refresher on the importance of a positive correct-to-incorrect ratio).
So how can we improve our correct-to-incorrect ratio, learn more from each mistake, and problem-solve a tricky passage without creating lots of bad habits in the process?
The value of the pause
Several researchers have looked at something known as the “inter-trial interval” or “post-KR delay” (KR stands for Knowledge of Results). This is the amount of time that elapses between one practice attempt and the next. For instance, if you’re practicing a tricky shift, you could just execute the shift over and over with no pauses between attempts. Or, you could try the shift, pause, and then try again. That pause between attempts is the inter-trial interval.
Thinking back, I’m not sure I ever made time for even the slightest pause between practice attempts when I was a kid. I totally piñata’d my way through every practice session. Heck, even in lessons I’d often cut my teachers off while they were still talking in a rush to play the passage again and get it right.
I always assumed that learning happened during the time my muscles were moving. The idea that some of the learning might take place in the time between practice attempts never occurred to me.
But…how long are we supposed to wait between practice attempts?
Are we talking an itty bitty pause? A more substantial grand pause? Might there even be an optimal pause length between practice attempts?
A test of different pause lengths
A 2005 study (Bock et al.) in the journal Experimental Brain Research yields a few clues.
35 participants were split up into six groups, and given one practice session (and 25 practice attempts) to learn a tricky motor task.
The only difference between groups was the amount of time each was given between practice attempts. One group received a 1 second pause between attempts, while the others were given either 5, 10, 15, 20, or 40 seconds.
Initial performance
The task was to move their index finger around in the air so as to manipulate a cursor and hit an on-screen target. Kind of like playing games on the original Wii. Except that their hand was hidden from view, and everything was 60 degrees off, so moving your fingers up would actually make the cursor move 60 degrees off-center.
If that sounds easy, just rotate your trackpad or mouse 60 degrees and try clicking on the links in this article really quickly. Not so easy, eh? 😅
Everyone improved with practice, but the participants who received only a 1-second pause between practice attempts consistently performed worse than the others, and weren’t as accurate in their efforts to hit the target.
Of course, the more important question is…how much of their performance gains would stick?
A retention test
24-36 hours later, everyone returned to the lab for a test to see how much of their finger pointing skills remained after a day of no further practice.
The test was simple. Just 5 attempts to perform the same exact task as the day before and hit the target.
As during training, the 5, 10, 15, 20, and 40-second groups all performed at about the same level. But once again, the 1-second group performed more poorly than the others.
Why?
The authors surmised that a 1-second break wasn’t enough time to process the information gleaned from each previous attempt, and get it into long-term memory.
So even though they took the same exact number of practice trials as the other participants, the amount of learning the 1-second pausers were able to do between trials was reduced. Hence, the difference in performance during training, and their inferior performance on the test the following day.
A second study
A 2007 study (Huang & Shadmehrin) the Journal of Neurophysiology also reported on this phenomenon.
Participants in this study engaged in essentially the same sort of task as in the previous study, except instead of waving their finger around in the air, they used a slightly different device (a “two-joint, planar manipulandum equipped with torque motors, rotary encoders, and force transducers” if you’re curious 😜).
Anyhow, the researchers in this study replicated the findings of the other study, observing that the longer delay of 14 seconds between practice attempts led to more rapid improvements than a shorter 4-second delay.
Of course, the point isn’t the pause itself, but what happens during the pause. And in a series of follow-up experiments, the authors found evidence suggesting that the performance improvement from trial to trial is due to the increased learning that can occur in the time following each error.
So what’s the takeaway?
Take action
It might take a little discipline to get in the habit of pausing for a few seconds between practice repetitions if you’re accustomed to rapid-fire repetitions one after the next. But in the week ahead, pay attention and see if you can catch yourself slipping into the tendency to piñata your way through your practice.
Take your time between repetitions. Pause. And don’t just count to five or 7 or 11, but use that time to ponder or reflect on what just happened, and why it happened. Plan your next move. Give it a go. And see if you find more of your work sticking from one day to the next, despite potentially putting in fewer repetitions overall.
References
Bock, O., Thomas, M., & Grigorova, V. (2005). The effect of rest breaks on human sensorimotor adaptation. Experimental Brain Research, 163(2), 258–260. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-005-2231-z
Huang, V., & Shadmehr, R. (2007). Evolution of Motor Memory During the Seconds After Observation of Motor Error. Journal of Neurophysiology, 97(6), 3976–3985. https://doi.org/10.1152/jn.01281.2006
Great post, Noa! That is going up on my blog! The pinata is a great metaphor. I am tempted to hang one up in my room to point to as a reminder. For myself, too. I find it useful to trouble shoot in that pause: What happened? What do I need to correct? Or, record myself and then listen back (but that is more than 5 seconds). Great help, thank you!
[…] Noa Kageyama, PhD’s post: For more perfect practice try longer pauses […]
With regard to the first study, a one second pause between attempts or ‘results’, though experimentally useful, if not necessary, seems a bit small for a realistic comparison with say a five seconds pause or more. It could be argued that a one second pause is more like a turn than a stop, or per this discussion a pause. In other words the practitioner, extending the analogy, is holding on to, or attempting to retain, or perhaps capture through a surge of creative energy either a defined goal or, as in improvisation, a unique yet fluid result (I’m obviously speaking in musical terms). Moreover, I think the tendency to rapidly attempt to refine an execution with little or no pause is not entirely without reason or merit. It is in essences the inherent need to ‘play’ without regard to process, or a well defined process. Of course and of necessity, a disciplined approach and understanding as to how to achieve a refined and defined result must be instituted and achieved initially, and primarily if, in the case of learning to play a musical instrument well, and in an established manner, is the goal.
What I am suggesting is that once a musician has learned to take reasonable pauses between attempts to learn and execute a phrase, and of course gain competence in all of the demands of a piece, the inherent tendency to play with less reflection, as with pauses, is natural, and perhaps the goal of competent musicianship. The tendency to ‘rush,’ in said fashion, is counterproductive when learning is the goal, yet, I suggest, at a higher level of competence and accomplishment, pausing disrupts the requisite flow necessary for artistic expression. Yes, I know, I’m somewhat conflating the demands of practice and performance. Perhaps, but my real point is to suggest that the psychological tendency to forge and hammer through a practice session, though counterproductive, has validity if and only if a practitioner has ‘mastered’ this tendency and can perform in a adequate and skilled fashion.
Of course, you don’t have to agree with my every point. But there is reason and logic to most of human behavior, and therefore the need to correct and comprehend how such behavior can be applied to certain and specific situations. I offer these opinions for your consideration. Thank you.
So… practice… like… William, Shatner?
Ha – good one. If I’m not mistaken, that might actually be the first Shatner reference on the entire blog…
Thank you Dr. Kageyama! Another great post! Funny, but just this past week I started to challenge my students to record their practice of one of their tricker songs and then listen back to it.
Two things that I noticed:
1: Some of the younger students had a slightly more difficult time following the music with a pencil than I had anticipated.
2: The challenge was to listen back and think about what areas stuck out, make some notes on the page and mentally internalize the tricky area(s) before trying it again the next day. I’ll be getting the results from this approach this week…
It seems to me like there are some interesting parallels between what I suggested and this article. It’s also nice in that I am having my students record this process on the iPhones or iPads… The extra bonus of this is I am having them label each recording with the name of the song and the date, thus having them create a musical diary of each song and their progress on their iPhones!
As I always tell my 35 students, they are as much a teacher to me as I am to them. 🙂
Warm regards,
Rod Contreras
Hi Rod,
Love the idea of a musical diary. We save our kids’ artwork (or at least take photos of their finger paintings and other random school projects), so it makes perfect sense to save snapshots of their playing as well.
That reminded me – have you seen this chronology of artist Marc Allante’s drawings/artwork from age 2 onwards? Pretty cool…
Rod, I also found that pausing and reflecting by having the little ones or adults describe in their own words how they did/what could be done better etc to be quite helpful. I let them put down notes and remarks. It is maybe a bit of a longer pause than recommended in the article, but I am curious about the question of ‘what to do in that pause’. The brain might just benefit from a little active processing and spelling it out in detail for a while may help that.
I love the idea of a regular iPhone library. I could even imagine my 8 year olds doing something like that over the course of the week on their own.
Great stuff!
Thank you
Ariane
So how can we improve our correct-to-incorrect ratio, learn more from each mistake, and get things up to par without creating lots of bad habits?
I like that statement above. In my case, I keep on doing the same thing over and over again without learning from it. This reminds me to take note of my mistake to make sure, I’m gonna do it right on my next attemp.
Gracie, there was a post on here a while ago that talked about how the best results were achieved by practicers who avoided mistakes entirely. Nothing worse than practicing mistakes. If we go slow enough it is possible to avoid them. Dr. k. Do you remember the post I am referring to by my description?
Yep; might it be this one? 8 Things Top Practicers Do Differently
Thanks for the link of the evolution of art Dr. Kageyama! It was great to show students just how amazing the progression of art is through time! I got a chance to share the link with students and they loved it!
Also, the way I’ve been presenting the whole process of recording oneself is in the context of attending a music concert: one person is the solo pianist, having to process and be the music maker and the other is an audience member who is watching the performer from the vantage point of an audience member. How do they experience the same music in that space? The basic premise is that when you record yourself, you are able to be the performer while playing live and then become like an audience member, observing your own playing from a different angle. You notice things about the music that you might not as a performer (especially for those who are not pros of course).
In general, in my own experience, I’ve found my own inner corrections to be more resonant and stimulating when coming from within myself than those given to me by others. Obviously a piano teacher’s feedback should be duly noted on the part of the student, but it seems to me that by having these recordings, not only do you increase self awareness, but also an ability to connect your eyes with the music better as well as increase the motivation for students to embrace the hard work that is practice, especially of trickier sections…
I need to share this stuff more with other piano teachers! Thanks and happy thanksgiving everyone!
I think there is an important variable not taken in consideration in the description of the studies. Let’s talk about the fist. If I take only 1 second between 25 tries, how much time do I spend studying? And if I take 5 or 10 seconds trying the same 25 times, how much time do I spend? Twice the time? Well, if that is the case, I could try 50 times taking only 1 second between each try spending the same amount of time practicing. The question is: would the larger space of time between the tries still be more effective in this case where I compare the same amount of time spent in the practice room? (now with different numbers of repetitions in each situation, naturally). I do believe that the answer probably is yes, but wouldn’t it also be considered in the studies?
Thank you,
Best regards from Brazil
Hi Menan,
Very astute observation. Yes, with longer pauses, it might mean that it takes longer to practice a particular phrase than if we played it without pauses. The researchers acknowledge that this isn’t necessarily a formula for faster practicing, but rather for more effective practice. The idea being, it’s not so much the number of repetitions we need to get in, but the ratio of correct to incorrect repetitions that’s likely to result in a higher level of playing proficiency.
[…] The above tip seems to also help when used in conjunction with another practice technique I’ve recently started trying – and that is to pause (I do around 5 seconds) before every attempt at improving whatever you are trying to improve. This tip came from this article https://bulletproofmusician.com/for-more-perfect-practice-trylongerpauses/ […]
Hi, I knew I had read something similar and found … your article! “Evidence That You Should Probably Be Taking Practice “Micro-Breaks,” if You Want to Maximize Learning”.
The bit I recalled was Neural replay, “Where during pauses in our practice, the brain basically reactivates the same neural circuits that are activated when physically performing the skill – only much faster”.
https://bulletproofmusician.com/evidence-that-you-should-probably-be-taking-practice-micro-breaks-if-you-want-to-maximize-learning/
That’s right! Another reason for pausing every now and again during practice. =) I’m pretty sure someone on the podcast must have recommended mini-breaks as well, from an injury-prevention perspective.