This is how I feel I perform when I do the same thing over and over:
The first question: why would that happen? With no knowledge of psychology or neuroscience, I would theorize that in the beginning, your brain is actively working to allow yourself to perform the task, and so your level of focus is high. As time passes, the repetition allows you to do the task almost without thinking, and as you begin to do the task more automatically, you lose your focus and perform worse. However, you begin to get better at doing the task automatically, and eventually you can reach or even surpass the level you were performing at in the beginning.
Maybe another way of saying it is that you get bored of the task. Like if you were studying, and you were really focused on it for a little bit but then you lost your focus. Not that the task you were doing is necessarily something you found boring, but perhaps your brain begins to lose its focus if it's the same thing with no significant changes.
The next question: where does this apply? Without enough significant testing on the subject, everything is still just throwing out possible ideas. But, my guess would be that it would occur when you do any repetitive task over and over, with the key being that the task was something you could just do by memory and without much thought after repeating it. And then, how constantly do you have to do the task? If you take a short break, will it be as if you were starting anew at the 0 minute point again? Or does it depend on the amount of time of the break and your memory of the task? Or does this case have a separate performance graph? If I had to take a wild guess, it would be that any break will revert you back to the 0 minute mark, but the shorter the break, the faster you progress through the time periods you've already gone through. So, if you were at the 30 minute mark and then you take a 1 minute break and then begin again, you experience the changes represented in the first 30 minutes of the graph very quickly, and then progress on normally from there. On the other hand, if you took a 3 hour break, you'd feel those changes at a rate closer to the rate represented in the graph. But, that's just a wild guess.
Next, what constitutes as a break? If you're playing a rhythm game and doing the same song over and over, and then you do a different song for 5 minutes, is that a break even though you're doing something similar? I don't know, but I'm going to have to test that one out a little bit.
And finally, how can this information be used (i.e. we want to write an article so what's the big picture stuff that will be advertised as the main result)?
Work less, get better results
In a new study, it has been found that taking frequent breaks will likely improve your performance in any task you are working on for a long period of time. Now you can tell your boss that if you take more breaks, you'll actually be more efficient and work better in the long run.Just kidding. But, it might be true that you can maintain a higher level of performance if you take frequent breaks. The other option is that maybe you should do everything for hours and hours straight until you begin performing at a higher level, and then you can continue to perform well as long as you keep doing the same thing with no breaks.
I think it'd be interesting to know if other people can or can't relate to this. And it'd also be interesting to know all the details on it, and investigate the topic fully and everything... But I guess I'm not that interested in it. I'm too busy playing osu! songs over and over until I get fc's and good scores on them.
I think you nailed it. And yes, the first thing I thought when I saw the title and graph was osu! performance.
ReplyDeleteI think the reason taking breaks helps is that you break the small, short-term bad habits that arise from having done something too many times. I notice that when I play a new song on osu!, I do remarkably well on parts of the song I would normally not expect to do well on - full screen jumps, large square/star patterns, long streams, etc. I usually end up missing somewhere, of course, whether due to a misread rhythm or random error. On immediate, subsequent runs, I'll find I start to do worse and worse on those "hard parts" I managed to hit the first time, specifically because I know they're coming. Instead of that "oh shit a note over there streeeeetch" reflex that lets me hit it, my brain goes "oh, there's a note coming over here" and then I either undershoot it or don't hover my cursor over the note long enough to actually hit it. Since I'm in a more relaxed autopilot mode, I automatically get lazier and start anticipating things too much.
After I inevitably screw up the 30th run, even though I only missed one note on my sightread, I ragequit osu!. Then I play it the next day, and get it on my first or second try. I've found that if I don't get something within the first five tries or so, my chances get exponentially worse as time goes on. I'm trying to hard-cap the number of retries on any given song in any session to 15.
In a global sense, taking breaks helps because, as you said, it lets you apply the newfound skill from practice while retaining the focus you had the first time.
The other big example for me was Mario Kart time trials. It was so frustrating to be doing well enough to get the world record right when I started playing but then to do worse and worse over time. If I played long enough though, like a few hours straight, then I would eventually do as well as I did when I started and sometimes even better.
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