Motor Imagery and Learning

Motor imagery is a cognitive process where individuals visualize the movements necessary to perform an action without physically executing it. This technique is often employed for learning and improving performance, as seen with athletes who mentally rehearse their movements, like a tennis player envisioning a perfect serve. Research has indicated that motor imagery can effectively enhance learning by providing mental simulations that aid in both response selection—the decision-making process regarding which action to take—and movement execution, though it primarily benefits response selection.

This concept has expanded beyond sports psychology into various fields, including medicine, education, and music, proving useful for rehabilitation and skill acquisition like surgical techniques. Moreover, advancements in technology, such as virtual reality and neurofeedback, are being explored to further enhance the efficacy of motor imagery. As researchers delve deeper into this field, they aim to understand its applications across diverse age groups and genders, alongside its potential for improving mental tasks that require spatial reasoning. Overall, motor imagery represents a promising approach to skill development and cognitive training across multiple domains.

Published in: 2021

By:

Subject Terms

Motor Imagery and Learning

Abstract

Motor imagery as a means of learning refers to the act of using one's imagination to simulate mentally the movements required to complete an action. A person might do this while trying to learn how to improve his or her performance of this action. For example, a tennis player could reflect back on practice time and mentally picture what motions to go through to perform a serve and how these might be adjusted to improve one's performance.

Overview

For many years, the assumption among cognitive psychologists was that learning how to perform actions was a function primarily accomplished through actual practice, that is, performing the action poorly at first and gradually improving as experience was acquired. Still, even to perform the action poorly the first time, it appears that there must have been some type of mental simulation used to arrive at a starting point. Eventually, it was recognized that there could also be a purely mental component to learning, because experiments were conducted in which subjects first read a set of instructions describing how to perform actions that they had no previous experience with. After having read these instructions, subjects were then allowed to practice the actions physically, and their performance was compared with a control group who had not read any instructions. The results showed that on average, reading instructions before having an opportunity to practice tended to shorten the amount of time it would take for subjects to master the performance of the actions (Sobierajewicz et al., 2016).

Subsequent to these experiments, another hypothesis emerged, suggesting that there might be a third mode of learning, incorporating elements of both physical practice and reading instructions. To test this possibility, subjects were instructed to visualize, without making any movements, the motions that would be necessary to perform an action. Of necessity, the actions selected were ones that the subjects were familiar with through having previously performed them—it would not be practical to ask people to visualize actions they had not read about or attempted, since they would not have any way of knowing if their visualizations bore any relationship to reality.

Results of the experiment showed that mental practice of physical actions improved participants' competency with these actions. Interestingly, the results also described two different aspects of physical performance of tasks that could be affected by the use of motor imagery: response selection and movement execution.

Response selection refers to the way a person decides what movement to make in response to a stimulus; an example would be a person who sees a ball speeding toward his or her head, and must quickly decide whether to duck or to step aside. Movement execution refers to the degree of effectiveness with which the selected movement is accomplished, once it has been selected. In the previous example, a person who ducks might not move downward far enough to avoid being struck by the ball, or a person who steps aside might trip and fall.

The experiment showed that the use of motor imagery was helpful with response selection, but it had no effect on movement execution; in other words, motor imagery helped people decide what to do, but did not have an impact on how well they were able to do it. This is in contrast with physical practice, which has a positive effect on both the selection of a response and the execution of that response (Zhang et al., 2014). This has had major implications for how the learning process is understood by educators, cognitive psychologists, and neuroscientists.

Research in this area could potentially benefit people from many walks of life, including athletes and others who need to have ways of training to improve their performance of physical tasks, as well as medical patients who have been injured and need to learn how to make certain motions again. There is even speculation that research into motor imagery could help facilitate the exploration of space and the ocean depths, as it could assist the operators of remote exploration devices with acquiring the skills needed to safely maneuver the craft (Cabral-Sequeira, Coelho & Teixeira, 2016).

Further Insights

One of the earliest fields to realize the importance of motor imagery to learning has been sports psychology, which uses psychological theory and insight to enhance the performance of athletes. Sports psychologists have long recognized that mental practice—another term for motor imagery—helps to improve athletes' performance, although the benefits are not as significant as those derived from actual, physical practice. Interest in motor imagery has since branched out from sports psychology into other areas, such as education, medicine, and even music, where motor imagery has been used to help students learn to play their instruments. Medical applications of motor imagery include future doctors using it to learn surgical techniques, and patients who are undergoing rehabilitation for injuries affecting their movement, such as strokes, spinal cord injuries, and so forth (Sakurada, Hirai & Watanabe, 2016).

Upon realizing the potential benefits of using motor imagery, researchers' next questions concerned when motor imagery should be used, with whom, and under what circumstances; and how it should be done, that is, the sort of guidance that should be given and with what activities motor imagery should be used in conjunction. Numerous studies have been conducted in an effort to answer these questions, many of them developing models and multi-stage processes for applying motor imagery.

While a single approach for motor imagery remains elusive, some findings have emerged and are now being used as guidance for the use of motor imagery. Most motor imagery interventions have a duration of fifteen to twenty minutes per session, and there seems to be a preference on the part of many participants to engage in motor imagery after performing physical practice, possibly because this is a time when the memory and mental impressions of the movements are freshest and easiest to recall (Bek et al., 2016).

Motor imagery seems to be more effective when it is used with movements that are shorter in duration and simpler to execute, similar to those found in sports, rather than longer and more complex, as those found in the use of motor imagery with musicians. This makes a kind of intuitive sense, because as a movement becomes more complicated, it is harder to remember it.

Motor imagery has been found to be effective regardless of whether it is used with an individual working independently, or with a group; the only difference seems to be that individuals tend to use shorter motor imagery sessions, while group sessions are longer, possibly because the additional distractions of working in a group require extra time to achieve the mental focus required for motor imagery work.

Two areas that have not yet been thoroughly studied concern the influence of gender and of age. Most of the existing research has been conducted on males, and most participants have been young adults. Additional studies among young children and the middle aged and elderly are needed in order to determine if the benefits of motor imagery are the same or different among these groups. Further research is especially needed to address the issue of any possible gender differences, given the existing presupposition that males' brain structure enables them to perform better on tasks that require the use of mental imagery; it may turn out that females surpass males in terms of benefits derived from motor imagery, whether this is due to superior recollection or other factors (Raisbeck et al., 2015).

Issues

Recent technological developments have opened up the possibility that human beings' ability to learn new skills through the use of motor imagery could be enhanced with the use of assistive technology, in particular virtual reality equipment and neurofeedback. Virtual reality is an immersive experience in which a person wears equipment that simulates an artificial world: a helmet provides visual input, gloves allow for a tactile experience, and sensors placed on the arms, legs, and feet help to simulate the movement of those appendages. The effect has been described as similar to watching a movie while being inside the action. Many different potential applications of virtual reality have been proposed, from entertainment to training, exploration, and even remote navigation of drones and robots. Researchers are also interested in exploring how virtual reality could be used to augment a person's ability to use motor imagery.

For example, it has been shown that motor imagery seems to be most effective when used after physical practice. This raises the possibility that in situations where physical practice is not an option due to limited space or other constraints, virtual reality might be a way of substituting for physical practice in order to facilitate motor imagery. For example, if a professional hang glider wanted to use motor imagery to keep practicing hang gliding moves during a long journey by train, it would not be possible to use physical practice as a support. However, using virtual reality to refresh one's impressions of hang gliding might provide an alternative method of increasing the effectiveness of motor imagery (Ruffino, Papaxanthis & Lebon, 2017).

Advances in neuroscience are providing new options as well. By connecting electrodes to a person's scalp, researchers are able to develop a picture of which parts of the brain are active during particular tasks, during specific emotional states, and when thinking about certain concepts or visualizing objects and scenarios. The electrodes detect the brain activity and this is then displayed on a screen showing a cross section of the brain in real time, with the active regions lighting up in different colors. Not only has this increased understanding about which parts of the brain are responsible for various tasks, but it has also allowed scientists to work with patients to train their brains, and even to control external events using their brains.

Research is ongoing into therapeutic games that allow a patient to navigate through the game merely by thinking about it; one game has the player fight against a dragon purely by thinking. The reason this works is because in order to fight within the game, the player must activate a particular part of the brain, which will then send signals that can be detected and communicated to the game's interface. As the player becomes more adept at the game, the player also builds the skill of controlling brain processes. This area of research has been of great interest to those studying motor imagery and learning.

The goal of research to date has been to use these brain training techniques to help people become more adept at the use of motor imagery. Essentially, what this involves is scanning a person's brain while they are attempting to use motor imagery, and guiding them in some way toward the most effective results. In the dragon game mentioned above, this guidance occurs when the player successfully defeats the dragon—even though the player cannot necessarily put into words the steps followed to achieve victory, over time the brain learns how to repeat the success. It has been hypothesized that the same approach may work with teaching the brain how to engage in motor imagery more quickly and with greater effectiveness (Theeuwes et al., 2017).

Another interesting area of motor imagery research appears to be pushing the limits of the practice. A wealth of research has shown that motor imagery helps with learning how to perform physical actions, whether these are as simple as skipping rope or as complex as tying a knot or playing a piano concerto. Scientists are now interested in discovering whether motor imagery can be used to improve performance of purely mental tasks that nevertheless rely on spatial reasoning and visualization, such as the development and testing of strategy and tactics for board games, sports competitions, and similar activities. Put more simply, researchers wish to know whether, since motor imagery can help a baseball player do a better job of swinging the bat, it can also help chess players improve their performance by being able to visualize the board and mentally play out various moves and countermoves. This type of task is similar to motor imagery, but instead of the focus being on the subject's own body and movements, it is on the physical arrangement of an abstract environment. The same type of skill might be helpful to a soldier trying to mentally picture a plan of attack or defense, or a soccer coach trying to decide how best to deploy the players on the field. If motor imagery could be used to enhance performance in these areas, possibly through the assistance of technological advances like those described above, the consequences in the real world could be significant (Kraeutner et al., 2016).

Terms & Concepts

Mental Practice: An older term used to describe essentially the same concept as motor imagery, the use of visualization to reinforce proficiency at physical movements.

Movement Execution: The performance of a physical action, such as swinging a bat, ringing a bell, and so on.

Neurofeedback: The use of sophisticated monitoring equipment to train people to modify their brain activity.

Response Selection: The mental selection of a physical response to a stimulus, from a variety of potential responses.

Task Representation: The manner in which a physical movement is mentally visualized.

Virtual Reality: Technology that artificially stimulates the senses in order to mimic an artificial environment which the user can navigate through.

Bibliography

Bek, J., Poliakoff, E., Marshall, H., Trueman, S., & Gowen, E. (2016). Enhancing voluntary imitation through attention and motor imagery. Experimental Brain Research, 234(7), 1819–1828.

Cabral-Sequeira, A. S., Coelho, D. B., & Teixeira, L. A. (2016). Motor imagery training promotes motor learning in adolescents with cerebral palsy: Comparison between left and right hemiparesis. Experimental Brain Research, 234(6), 1515–1524.

Kraeutner, S. N., MacKenzie, L. A., Westwood, D. A., & Boe, S. G. (2016). Characterizing skill acquisition through motor imagery with no prior physical practice. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 42(2), 257–265.

Raisbeck, L. D., Diekfuss, J. A., Wyatt, W., & Shea, J. B. (2015). Motor imagery, physical practice, and memory: The effects on performance and workload. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 121(3), 691–705. Retrieved January 1, 2018 from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=112949060&site=ehost-live

Ruffino, C., Papaxanthis, C., & Lebon, F. (2017). Neural plasticity during motor learning with motor imagery practice: Review and perspectives. Neuroscience, 341, 61–78.

Sakurada, T., Hirai, M., & Watanabe, E. (2016). Optimization of a motor learning attention-directing strategy based on an individual's motor imagery ability. Experimental Brain Research, 234(1), 301–311.

Sobierajewicz, J., Przekoracka-Krawczyk, A., Jaśkowski, W., & Lubbe, R. J. (2017). How effector-specific is the effect of sequence learning by motor execution and motor imagery? Experimental Brain Research, 235(12): 3757–3769.

Sobierajewicz, J., Szarkiewicz, S., Przekoracka-Krawczyk, A., Jaśkowski, W., & van der Lubbe, R. (2016). To what extent can motor imagery replace motor execution while learning a fine motor skill? Advances in Cognitive Psychology, 12(4), 178–191.

Theeuwes, M., Liefooghe, B., De Schryver, M., & De Houwer, J. (2017). The role of motor imagery in learning via instructions. Acta Psychologica, S0001-6918(16)30382-1.

Zhang, H., Long, Z., Ge, R., Xu, L., Jin, Z., Yao, L., & Liu, Y. (2014). Motor imagery learning modulates functional connectivity of multiple brain systems in resting state. Plos ONE, 9(1), 1–7.

Motor Imagery and Learning

On this Page

Subject Terms

Motor Imagery and Learning

Abstract

Overview

Further Insights

Issues

Terms & Concepts

Bibliography

Suggested Reading