An Evaluation of a Movement Imagery Training Scheme

Abstract

Movement imagery has become an important tool in a variety of fields but individual differences in imagery ability mean that some participants, with weak imagery abilities, may not be able to engage in imagery tasks or programs. In this article we present an evaluation of a training scheme designed to improve movement imagery ability. The scheme lasted 4 weeks, involving four individual training sessions lasting 1–1 1/2 hours each and homework. The scheme emphasized relaxation and kinaesthetic awareness, external and internal perspective movement imagery, prospective action judgments, and motorically driven perceptual decisions. Ten participants, of mean age 35 ( SD = 11.97), participated in the training scheme and 12 participants, of mean age 35.33 ( SD = 13.38), participated in the control group. The performance of the trainee group was compared to the performance of the control group on a series of visual and movement imagery measures, completed before and after training. In comparison to controls, trainees improved significantly on a number of key measures of movement imagery ability but did not improve on any measure of visual imagery ability. The results demonstrated that explicit and implicit aspects of movement imagery ability can be improved through imagery training.