Abstract
Over the last two decades, the number of studies on motor imagery in children has witnessed a large expansion. Most studies used the hand laterality judgment paradigm or the mental chronometry paradigm to examine motor imagery ability. The main objective of the current review is to collate these studies to provide a more comprehensive insight in children’s motor imagery development and its age of onset. Motor imagery is a form of motor cognition and aligns with forward (or predictive) models of motor control. Studying age-related differences in motor imagery ability in children therefore provides insight in underlying processes of motor development during childhood. Another motivation for studying age-related differences in motor imagery is that in order to effectively apply motor imagery training in children (with motor impairments), it is pertinent to first establish the age at which children are actually able to perform motor imagery. Overall, performance in the imagery tasks develops between 5 and 12 years of age. The age of motor imagery onset, however, remains equivocal, as some studies indicate that children of 5 to 7 years old can already enlist motor imagery in an implicit motor imagery task, whereas other studies using explicit instructions revealed that children do not use motor imagery before the age of 10. From the findings of the current study, we can conclude that motor imagery training is potentially a feasible method for pediatric rehabilitation in children from 5 years on. We suggest that younger children are most likely to benefit from motor imagery training that is presented in an implicit way. Action observation training might be a beneficial adjunct to implicit motor imagery training. From 10 years of age, more explicit forms of motor imagery training can be effectively used.
Highlights
In a series of studies that have appeared in the last decade (Tamir et al, 2007; Lee et al, 2011; Page et al, 2011; Cho et al, 2012), it was shown that motor imagery training can be beneficial for motor rehabilitation in adult patients with acquired brain damage, in particular stroke
Despite its proven effectiveness for rehabilitation in adult stroke patients, and despite converging evidence showing that problems in motor imagery are concomitant with motor control problems in congenital motor disorders such as cerebral palsy (CP) and developmental coordination disorder (DCD; Wilson et al, 2001; Crajé et al, 2010), empirical studies on motor imagery training in these children are scarce
How does motor imagery develop during childhood? At what age are children able to reliably use motor imagery? These insights are necessary to judge the feasibility of motor imagery training to promote motor performance in young children with congenital motor disorders (Steenbergen et al, 2009, 2013)
Summary
In a series of studies that have appeared in the last decade (Tamir et al, 2007; Lee et al, 2011; Page et al, 2011; Cho et al, 2012), it was shown that motor imagery training can be beneficial for motor rehabilitation in adult patients with acquired brain damage, in particular stroke (for reviews see Sharma et al, 2006; Dickstein and Deutsch, 2007; Zimmermann-Schlatter et al, 2008; Malouin and Richards, 2010). Motor imagery is supposed to stimulate the neural networks that underlie the planning and control of movements. Motor imagery training in rehabilitation is regarded as a ‘backdoor’ to facilitate a patient’s motor performance (Sharma et al, 2006)
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