So I Did: Memoir of Richard A. Schmidt

By Richard A. Schmidt

He writes about his early years and the decision-making processes he made to enter academia, to become a contributing scientist in psychology, physical education, motor control and motor learning. He is highly regarded as the world's expert on pedal errors, associated with unintended acceleration in automobiles.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu Publishing Services
• Release date: Jul 23, 2015
• ISBN: 9781483432779

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SO I DID

Memoir of Richard A. Schmidt

Richard A. Schmidt

Copyright © 2015 Richard A. Schmidt.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted by any means—whether auditory, graphic, mechanical, or electronic—without written permission of both publisher and author, except in the case of brief excerpts used in critical articles and reviews. Unauthorized reproduction of any part of this work is illegal and is punishable by law.

ISBN: 978-1-4834-3278-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4834-3277-9 (e)

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

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Lulu Publishing Services rev. date: 07/17/2015

CONTENTS

Foreword

Introduction

1   The Early Years

2   Santa Barbara

3   Go Bears!

4   The Illinois Years

5   Maryland

6   Michigan

7   Early California, 1974 – 1988

8   Later California (80S To Present)

References

This memoir is dedicated to my wife Gwen,

who has helped me in so many ways.

I want to thank those who helped me with this project: Gwen Gordon, Dianne Hopkins, Marilyn Lomeli, Tim Lee, and Tanya Lee.

Foreword

T he word iconic does not often come to mind when referring to a researcher. An exception is Richard (Dick) Schmidt. By the time that my research career was launched in the late 1970s, Dick had already founded the Journal of Motor Behavior and served as its editor for almost a decade, had published prolifically in the top journals in psychology and the field starting to be known as kinesiology, and was the author of schema theory – the dominant motor learning theory of the day. His is a marquee name in the world of motor-behavior research.

The icon also had a marquee persona. Dick was a featured speaker wherever he went – peer-reviewed conferences, invited lectures, prestigious seminars, and so on. His delivery as a speaker was nothing short of mesmerizing. One of my fondest recollections of the many times listening to Dick speak occurred at the 1982 NASPSPA conference in College Park, MD. He was part of a seminar that was discussing motor learning. At the time, motor-learning research was in one of its down periods – conference sessions and journal pages were filled with research concerning motor control – motor learning was a forgotten area. The NASPSPA seminar was designed to change that. Dick presented the results of a huge re-evaluation of the knowledge of results (KR) literature that he had undertaken, along with Al Salmoni and Chuck Walter. Their work re-emphasized the important distinction between performance and learning and revised the roles of KR in performance vs. learning. The findings were shocking to those interested in learning and the impact was immediate. Many of us rushed home to our labs and began to devise, carry out and publish new studies on KR.

Dick has mentored and influenced the careers of many students and young scientists, perhaps in ways that even he doesn’t fully realize. My own personal experiences have been many. Dick was the editor of JMB to whom I submitted my first manuscript ever. His warm, personal letter, sharing the positive comments of the reviewers, was one that I treasured and re-read often – a life-changing experience for a young PhD student. Some years later, Dick sought me out at a conference after I presented the findings of one of my doctoral dissertation studies and told me that the findings were some of the most exciting that he’d heard in a long time. And some years after that he said something to me that would change my life in many ways – over supper at the Cal Yacht Club, Dick asked me if I would join him as a co-author on the next edition of Motor Learning and Control – the bible of motor behavior textbooks. Wow!

Motor behavior research has sometimes been criticized as being too theoretical in its achievements. Indeed, Google Scholar lists Dick’s theoretical contributions as his four most frequently-cited papers: schema theory (Schmidt, 1975 – 2557 citations), motor output variability theory (Schmidt et al., 1979 – 1145 citations), the practice conceptualizations paper (Schmidt & Bjork, 1992 - 1122 citations), and KR theory (Salmoni et al., 1984 - 951 citations). But, one aspect of Dick’s career that is not clearly described in his memoir, but which has probably influenced me more than any, is his devotion to providing practical applications for motor behavior research. For example, this devotion was illustrated early in his career, when he described the role of schema theory in movement education practice in the short-lived journal, Motor Skills: Theory into Practice (Schmidt, 1977). Later on, when his career began to shift towards human factors, Dick published a paper on potential motor-control contributions to cases of unintended acceleration (Schmidt, 1989), making a strong case for the use of knowledge generated by motor-control researchers to understand issues and concerns for the human-factors specialist. The important role of feedback and KR in everyday actions was the focus of a key talk and paper that Dick provided to physical therapists (Schmidt, 1991). And this devotion has continued up to this day, with requests for practical applications of motor-learning research by representatives of fields as diverse as law enforcement, surgery, and golf instruction. Dick is the poster child of Kurt Lewin’s statement that there is nothing more practical than a good theory.

In reading through these memoir chapters, Dick portrays to the reader that all of his successes came rather easily. Even the title of this book, So I Did implies a sense of destiny with which Dick’s accomplishments came about. Nothing could be further from the truth. Anyone who has ever conducted and published research or run a marathon will tell you that success comes only after countless hours of purposeful devotion. And there are few in this business who works harder than Dick. This memoir describes how Dick did it. But make no mistake – underlying it all was a work ethic built on an intent to change the direction of motor control and learning research. He did; and we owe him a debt of gratitude for it.

— Timothy D. Lee

McMaster University

INTRODUCTION

T his book is about my life and the many forces that caused me to change direction at various times. As such, it is a description of various phases in my life and the detail of the forces, their consequences, and how I dealt with them. The reader might puzzle at the title, So I Did , which is taken from a line in the Rolling Stones song, Far Away Eyes. I have always loved writing styles in which a very long sentence is followed by a very short one. One of the early presentations of this style was done by a former professor of mine, Dr. Jack Adams, where Adams is writing formally and generates a very long sentence which describes the results and methods of an experiment in a pseudo-question form. The next sentence, more or less, answers the question by saying It was. In the case of Mick Jagger, he begins the song with a description of what he is doing in his British/Southern/truck driver twang: I was drivin’ home early Sunday mornin’ through Bakersfield, listenin’ to gospel music on the colored ‘raydio staytion’… This is all accompanied by reasonably authentic sounding country music, (even a steel guitar). Then he says, Well, the preacher kept right on sayin’ that all I had to do was send ten dollars to the church of the sacred bleeding heart of Jesus located somewhere in Los Angeles, California, and the next week they’d say my name on the radio, and all my dreams would come true. Then Jagger says So I did. This seemed to be an apt description of some of the complex decision-making I had to do in my research career. I feel like, in my career, some relatively complicated issues would come up, and this book is a description of some of these forces, and how these decisions have played themselves out in my life.

Chronologically, I begin with my birth near Chicago, then the move to California, and my earliest school years in California. Then I speak of junior high and high school, accompanied by various recreational activities or sports. I go on to talk about college at Cal and my participation in gymnastics, followed by graduate school at Cal and, later, at Illinois where several watershed events occurred that determined my ultimate career. For one interested in motor behavior, it might be interesting to follow the career decisions that I have made along the line. One of the major decisions involved gymnastics. In practicing gymnastics I naturally was curious about products of practice that would allow me to produce these actions in the future. It was also about this time that I decided to become a physical-education major (math minor), with the goal of becoming a gymnastics coach and a math teacher, which I did for one year. Throughout, I continued to be fascinated by the products of practice, along with the teachings of Dr. Franklin Henry at Cal, who led a group of junior and senior scientists (Dr. Joseph Royce & Dr. David Clarke), who had chosen the career in which I was interested as their main occupation. Naturally, these folks became my role models, doing research and teaching in motor behavior. But in order to follow this career many said that I needed a doctorate, thus began my search for graduate school after Cal.

After consulting with several members of the Cal faculty, I decided that Illinois was the place to go; Illinois was a respected graduate school in PE, plus my hero, Jack Adams, was there on the psychology faculty. Now that I had narrowed career possibilities, I got to work on this goal at Illinois. Illinois was the beginning of my academic career, and I focused very hard on this end-goal. In graduate school I learned quickly that research in motor behavior was heavily based on experimental psychology. Many of the findings that defined our knowledge came from experimental psychology (also neurology and engineering). This book lays out the events that led to my academic career, and describe how a humble PE major at Cal became a reasonably well-established, respected scientist and member of the academic field of motor behavior.

1

The Early Years

I was born in Evanston, Illinois, just north of Chicago, in March, 1941. My parents, Allen W. Schmidt and Virginia S. Schmidt lived in a small Chicago-suburb called Park Ridge, which was near the present location of O’Hare Airport. My dad had been employed by various people in Chicago, most recently by R.R. Donnelly and Company in the printing and advertising business. Allen and Virginia lived a simple, middle-class life there. In about 1943, Allen (then 31) and Virginia—being fed up with Chicago winters, I guess – decided to move to Los Angeles, California. World War II was raging in Europe, and Southern California was bustling with activity and promise. In a very gutsy move, Allen and Virginia packed up their belongings into a small trailer, attached it to their 1941 Packard 2-door sedan, loaded up the family, and set off for Los Angeles. This was done without any guaranteed position when Allen arrived, with very little savings, and with the kind of pioneer spirit that led them to believe that everything would be fine. Initially, they stayed in a small motel in Santa Monica. I cannot recall all the places we lived, but at one point they rented a house (see Figure 1.1) in the Rampart District of Los Angeles, on Coronado St. not far from downtown.

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Figure 1.1 - Our first house in L.A., 232 N. Coronado Street.

Eventually, I wound up attending kindergarten at a local public school there. I was young, so I don’t remember very much about the Coronado house, except from photos and viewing home movies. One very vivid memory, however, involves my dad’s brother, Robert (Uncle Bob), who returned, via Los Angeles, from World War II (he was in the US Army Paratroopers in Europe) in 1945. I recall him as being a very dashing figure, with many very impressive war stories to tell. Figure 1.2 shows my mom, dad, and Uncle Bob on the left. Uncle Bob later settled in Southern California, bringing his wife, Lu and their young sons, Mark and Gregg from the greater Chicago area. They moved to a small community in the northwest corner of the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles, called Granada Hills—a very small community nestled among the orange and lemon groves, with many dirt streets, and a single Main Street. Soon, Bob was working at Lockheed Aircraft just outside downtown LA, and commuted to work on his motorcycle.

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Figure 1.2 – Uncle Bob with my mom and dad.

Around 1947, my parents followed Uncle Bob to Granada Hills in the San Fernando Valley, as well. They purchased a very modest ranch-style house on one of the few paved streets, 232 Kingsbury Street (brand new for $7500!). The Valley’s original contribution to Los Angeles was as a farming area, but it quickly turned into a giant LA suburb. We witnessed first-hand the destruction of a mainly agricultural area, via bulldozing orange and lemon groves, and replacing them with tacky tract housing. Very sad, indeed!

Granada Hills was an ideal place for a young boy to grow up. There were many areas of the local foothills to explore, as well as an irrigation creek and pond lined with willows that coursed through an open field a few blocks away from our house; the creek led to Jack’s Lake—a murky bulge in the creek that lay in the center of a large open field.

I had various pets while we were there. Somewhere, I came across a white laboratory rat that we named Schmoo, after a comic-strip character. Schmoo is shown in Figure 1.3 which contains a photo of me with Schmoo (my mom named this photograph Boy with Rat).

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Figure 1.3 – Schmoo and me (Boy with Rat).

Somewhat later, I acquired a pair of black and white laboratory rats (later I learned that they were of a Sprague-Dawley strain), and to no one’s surprise, a litter of rat pups soon arrived. These were great play things. They would crawl down your shirt sleeves until they could go no longer because it was too tight, then they would somehow magically turn around and come out again. During this time, I also had a dog named Irish, a Kerry-Blue terrier who is shown with me in Figure 1.4. He was a great dog, who could trot along on all but the longest trips. The only problem with him was that he was a ferocious fighter with other male dogs. He was really a psycho.

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Figure 1.4 – Irish and me on the Granada Hills house front lawn.

During those years, I attended Granada Hills Elementary School, starting in the second grade there. In the Los Angeles school systems, I was on a yearly schedule such that I had to begin and end a grade in February. When I started at Granada Hills Elementary School, the school district there did not operate on that same schedule, so my parents were faced with the question concerning whether I should move ahead one-half year, or whether I should move back at that time. My mom was very proud of my success in the lower grades, and I’m sure this