Abstract
Research in sports, dance and rehabilitation has shown that basic action concepts (BACs) are fundamental building blocks of mental action representations. BACs are based on chunked body postures related to common functions for realizing action goals. In this paper, we outline issues in research methodology and an experimental method, the structural dimensional analysis of mental representation (SDA-M), to assess action-relevant representational structures that reflect the organization of BACs. The SDA-M reveals a strong relationship between cognitive representation and performance if complex actions are performed. We show how the SDA-M can improve motor imagery training and how it contributes to our understanding of coaching processes. The SDA-M capitalizes on the objective measurement of individual mental movement representations before training and the integration of these results into the motor imagery training. Such motor imagery training based on mental representations (MTMR) has been applied successfully in professional sports such as golf, volleyball, gymnastics, windsurfing, and recently in the rehabilitation of patients who have suffered a stroke.
Highlights
Neurocognition and Action–Biomechanics Research Group, Center of Excellence “Cognitive Interaction Technology”, Research Institute for Cognition and Robotics, Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany
We have presented a method to objectively evaluate the structure among basic action concepts, the fundamental building blocks of movement representations at the mental level
Reported evidence shows that the structure of movement representations as assessed with the structural dimensional analysis of mental representation (SDA-M) is associated with individual skill levels, biomechanical and task constraints and changes through training
Summary
The SDA-M capitalizes on the objective measurement of individual mental movement representations before training and the integration of these results into the motor imagery training. The SDA-M (Schack, 2010) maps mental representations as integrated networks of BACs across both individuals and groups, by providing information on relational structures in a given set of concepts with respect to goal-oriented actions. Another basic assumption of the perceptual-cognitive model is that imagining a movement and performing it are based on the www.frontiersin.org same representations (Jeannerod, 1995, 2004), which can explain the effectiveness of motor imagery training.
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