Abstract
While considered analogous to physical practice, the nature of imagery-based skill acquisition—specifically whether or not both effector independent and dependent encoding occurs through motor imagery—is not well understood. Here, motor imagery-based training was applied prior to or after physical practice-based training to probe the nature of imagery-based skill acquisition. Three groups of participants (N = 38) engaged in 10 days of training of a dart throwing task: 5 days of motor imagery prior to physical practice (MIP-PP), motor imagery following physical practice (PP-MIP), or physical practice only (PP-PP). Performance-related outcomes were assessed throughout. Brain activity was measured at three time points using fMRI (pre/mid/post-training; MIP-PP and PP-MIP groups). In contrast with physical practice, motor imagery led to changes in global versus specific aspects of the movement. Following 10 days of training, performance was greater when motor imagery preceded physical practice, although remained inferior to performance resulting from physical practice alone. Greater activation of regions that support effector dependent encoding was observed mid-, but not post-training for the PP-MIP group. Findings indicate that changes driven by motor imagery reflect effector independent encoding, providing new information regarding how motor imagery may be leveraged for skill acquisition.
Highlights
While considered analogous to physical practice, the nature of imagery-based skill acquisition— whether or not both effector independent and dependent encoding occurs through motor imagery—is not well understood
Participants trained on a complex motor skill, via equivalent amounts of physical practice and motor imagery applied in a different order: the first group performed physical practice followed by motor imagery (PP-MIP), and the second group performed motor imagery followed by physical practice (MIP-PP)
That motor imagery operates via effector independent encoding, arises from the finding that motor imagery led to improvements in consistency, and larger overall improvements in performance were observed when motor imagery was applied prior to physical practice rather than its alternative
Summary
While considered analogous to physical practice, the nature of imagery-based skill acquisition— whether or not both effector independent and dependent encoding occurs through motor imagery—is not well understood. Notwithstanding this difference, motor imagery has long been considered analogous to physical practice, including shared neural representations, providing a basis for its effectiveness for driving skill a cquisition[1,2,3] Contesting this long-standing assumption of functional equivalence recent work has suggested that motor imagery results only in the effector independent encoding of a motor program (i.e., referring to global movement features, and the integration of perceptual information to movement goals that are not specific to an effector g roup4–9) as opposed to effector dependent encoding that occurs in physical practice (i.e., mapping the movement goals and specific movement parameters to the effector to be used in the task)[10,11,12,13]. A bout of physical practice-based training leads to inferior performance with the untrained relative to the trained effector[4] and greater encoding of effector dependent information[6] In these studies, overall improvements in performance resulting from motor imagery remained inferior to those driven through physical p ractice[4,6]. Based on the above theoretical framework, we argue that improvements in performance resulting from physical practice would not be equivalent between groups (i.e., indicating changes overall were due strictly to physical practice), and would instead depend on when motor imagery was applied in the training timeline
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