Motor Skills Laboratory

Have you ever wondered what is involved in imagining movement and the content and experiences that contribute to that process? These questions were explored in this study, where the authors studied how imagining movement was influenced by prior practice either “doing” or just “seeing” the movement being performed by someone else. Imagining movement can be broken down into two components; imagining how the movement looks (from your perspective, or the perspective of someone else watching you) and imagining how movement feels (inherently from your perspective). There is also reason to think that movement imagery in general is enhanced when the person has physically experienced an action and draws on that movement representation to imagine. Participants in this study were randomly chosen to physically practise or observe a unique sequence of hand gestures (like sign language). The physical practice group could not see their hand while practising (blocked by a screen), and the observation group watched a physical practise participant from above and behind. As expected, physical practise improved the subjective quality of imagining the feel of movement, while observation best improved the quality of imagining the look of movement. However, when the authors measured the time to perform and compared it to the time to imagine the movement (a traditional imagery measure designed to infer whether the timing-related content was drawing on the movement representation), surprisingly it was the observation group that showed greater similarity in actual and imagined timing. The authors suggested that for motor imagery to be most effective, an initial visual representation is needed to ‘anchor’ kinesthetic imagery. Stated another way, to best imagine how a movement looks and feels, it is not enough just to have experience performing. As such, theorists and practitioners should not assume that motor imagery automatically mirrors actual movement.