Motor Skills Laboratory

It shouldn’t be surprising that to learn a new motor skill (a golf swing, perhaps?), that watching someone perform it a few times is a good place to start. However, our research here suggests that it might be worth taking a moment to imagine yourself performing the golf swing too, after watching, to give yourself a realistic notion of your present abilities. This
‘pause and imagine’ step is important because just after (repeated) watching, you would be tempted to think your ability to perform a golf swing is better than it actually is. Imagining yourself doing it - what the swing looks and feels like, can help temper your (over)confidence. How does this work? Motor imagery is thought to provide access to sensory information associated with the execution of movements, including how it feels and a sense of the consequences of trying to perform the movement. These imagined consequences can then help more accurately assess your own motor capabilities. To test this idea, that engaging in motor imagery after action observation would influence assessment of one’s own motor capabilities, researchers in our lab compared two groups; one that only observed videos of juggling and another that engaged in motor imagery after watching the same action. Throughout the trials of watching successful juggling actions (and imagining), both groups rated their confidence in performing the juggling task. It turned out that confidence increased with repeated observation in both groups, but the increase was tempered in the group that additionally imagined how it would feel to do the action themselves. This latter result provides evidence that imagery helped to provide a more realistic self-assessment of motor capabilities following observation of successful actions. The findings of this study can be used to create interventions for motor skill acquisition, by coupling demonstrations with motor imagery, with the aim that this not only increases awareness of motor capability, but also learning.