Abstract
This study investigates the assessment of motor imagery (MI) ability in humans. Commonly, MI ability is measured through two methodologies: a self-administered questionnaire (MIQ-3) and the mental chronometry (MC), which measures the temporal discrepancy between the actual and the imagined motor tasks. However, both measures rely on subjects' self-assessment and do not use physiological measures. In this study, we propose a novel set of features extracted from the nonlinear dynamics of the eye gaze signal to discriminate between good and bad imagers. To this aim, we designed an experiment where twenty volunteers, categorized as good or bad imagers according to MC, performed three tasks: a motor task (MT), a visual Imagery task (VI), and a kinaesthetic Imagery task (KI). Throughout the experiment, the subjects' eye gaze was continuously monitored using an eye-tracking system. Eye gaze time series were analyzed through recurrence quantification analysis of the reconstructed phase space and compared between the two groups. Statistical results have shown how nonlinear eye behavior can express an inner dynamics of imagery mental process and may be used as a more objective and physiological-based measure of MI ability.
Highlights
Motor imagery (MI) is a cognitive process by which an individual rehearses or simulates a given action (Choudhury et al, 2007)
We have investigated the temporal dynamics of the eye movements, through Recurrence Quantification Analysis (RQA) of the reconstructed phase space, which allows identifying complex and nonlinear eye gaze behavior (Eckmann et al, 1987; Casdagli, 1997; Marwan et al, 2002, 2007)
Each RQA feature showed a significant higher values for the bad imagers (BI) group compared to the good imagers (GI) one, i.e., a higher complexity of the eye dynamics evaluated through the Point-to-Point Instantaneous Gaze Direction (PPIGD) time series
Summary
Motor imagery (MI) is a cognitive process by which an individual rehearses or simulates a given action (Choudhury et al, 2007). MI ability is commonly measured through two main methodologies: self-administered questionnaires and mental chronometry (MC) (Moran et al, 2012). A widely used questionnaire is the Motor Imagery Questionnaire-3 (MIQ-3), which is a self-reported assessment of the ability to recreate a mental motor representation (Williams et al, 2012). The MC is the measure of the temporal discrepancy between the actual and the imagined motor tasks (Moran et al, 2012; Williams et al, 2015). This approach grounds on the fact that executed and imagined tasks
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