Practicing with or without distraction?

Talk to any pianist, and they probably have a page turning horror story to share.

Maybe it was a page turner who didn’t read music as well as they thought they did, so they were consistently behind in their page turns, no matter how vigorously you nodded your head in an attempt to cue them.

Or in the case of one friend of mine, it was a page turner whose giant flowing sleeves obscured much of the music and even portions of the keyboard until the page was turned. Each of which was also accompanied by a strong whiff of perfume as they sat back down.

Whether it’s less-than-ideal page turners, audience members arriving late, front-row loud whisperers, or an audition proctor who sits directly in your line of sight, it’s easy for us to get distracted under pressure by the most unexpected and trivial-seeming things.

So is there anything we can do to get better at being more immune to such distractions?

A study!

We tend to assume that practicing while distracted is a big no-no. And that we’ll ultimately perform worse, if we don’t practice with complete focus and attention.

But researchers at Brown University (Song & Bédard, 2015) were curious to test this assumption that being distracted during practice results in poorer learning and performance.

So, they devised a test to see what would happen when individuals practiced a motor task while totally focused on the task at hand vs. when they had to learn the task while distracted.

The task

They asked 48 volunteers to practice a simple motor task which involved using a stylus/touchpad to drag a cursor to a target on a computer screen.

The task started off easily enough, but after 40 trials, the computer rotated the controls by 45 degrees, so that the participants would have to adjust their movements on the touchpad and overcorrect by 45 degrees in order to hit the desired targets. Sort of like adjusting for the slope of a putting green in golf, where instead of hitting the ball straight at the cup, you have to hit at an angle in order to get the ball to end up going straight.

A distraction

As the participants struggled to adjust to the more challenging motor task and direct the cursor to the correct target, some were also tasked with counting certain symbols that flashed on their screen. Other participants saw the flashing symbols, but were told to ignore them.

After 160 such practice trials, they were asked to do another 80 non-rotated trials (to allow some forgetting to set in and get them out of rhythm a bit – sort of like how football coaches will often call a timeout to try and “ice” the kicker before a field goal attempt).

A test

Then, it was time for a test to see how much of the training stuck. The computer re-rotated the controls 45 degrees, and the participants had 80 chances to successfully hit the targets.

One group of participants never had to deal with the symbols – neither during the practice trials nor during the test trials (no distraction group).

Another group of participants always had to deal with the distracting symbol-counting task – both during practice and the test (distracted group).

And then there were a few groups which had to deal with the distractions at either practice or testing, but not both (distracted practice or distracted performance groups).

So which group performed best on the test?

Who did best?

Intuitively, one might think that the group which never had to deal with distractions would do best. Followed perhaps by the group which was able to practice in peace, but was tested with distractions.

But as it turns out, the distracted group which had to deal with distractions both during practice and performance performed about the same as the no distraction group which never had to deal with distractions.

It was the either or groups that struggled. In other words, for those who practiced with distractions, taking the distractions away during the test actually made performance worse! And for those who practiced without distractions, not surprisingly, adding distractions to the test also made performance worse.

A follow-up study

The researchers did a follow-up study to dig a little deeper, and tweaked the design so that participants would have to deal with a different distraction during the test than what they encountered in the practice trials.

And did this make any difference?

Nope!

The results were the same. Which suggests that it didn’t matter whether the distractions during practice and testing were the same or not. It only mattered that distractions be present (or not present) at both practice and testing.

Take action

So what does this all mean?

I don’t think this means it’s ok to practice or do one’s warmups while watching TV or browsing the internet. (Sorry! 😅)

It’s more about strategically and intentionally practicing with and without distractions at certain times.

For instance, we don’t want to be so accustomed to practicing in complete quiet and solitude, that we get thrown by the inevitable distractions we’ll face when we walk on stage.

Conversely, we don’t want to be so accustomed to practicing in a practice room surrounded by the comforting (or annoying) din of others’ music-making, that the deathly silence of a screened audition becomes overly distracting too.

https://bulletproofmusician.com/why-practicing-while-distracted-is-actually-very-important-sometimes/