Physiological changes in response to apnea impact the timing of motor representations: a preliminary study.

Nady Hoyek,Aymeric Guillot,Franck Di Rienzo,Christian Collet

doi:10.1186/1744-9081-10-15

Abstract

BackgroundReduced physiological arousal in response to breath-holding affects internal clock processes, leading swimmers to underestimate the time spent under apnea. We investigated whether reduced physiological arousal during static apnea was likely to affect the temporal organization of motor imagery (MI).MethodsFourteen inter-regional to national breath-holding athletes mentally and physically performed two 15 m swimming tasks of identical durations. They performed the two sequences in a counterbalanced order, the first while breathing normally using a scuba, the second under apnea. We assessed MI duration immediately after completion of the corresponding task. Athletes performed MI with and without holding breath.ResultsMI durations (26.1 s ± 8.22) were significantly shorter than actual durations (29.7 s ± 7.6) without holding breath. Apnea increased MI durations by 10% (± 5%). Heart rate decrease in response to breath-holding correlated with MI durations increase (p < .01). Under apnea, participants achieved temporal congruence between MI and PP only when performing MI of the apnea swimming task. Self-report data indicated greater ease when MI was performed in a physiological arousal state congruent with that of the corresponding motor task.ConclusionsPhysiological arousal affected the durations of MI through its effects on internal clock processes and by impacting the congruency in physiological body states between overt and covert motor performance. Present findings have potential implications with regards to the possibility of preventing underestimation of durations spent under a state of reduced physiological arousal.

Highlights

Motor Imagery (MI) is the mental representation of a motor act without engaging in its actual execution
A large body of neuroscience research supports that motor imagery (MI) and physical practice (PP) of the same task share overlapping neural substrates [1,2,3,4], and involve functionally equivalent neural processes [5,6,7,8]
While some intrinsic features of the task might impact its imagined duration, the sport imagery literature acknowledges that the construction of the temporal organization of MI is primarily based on the temporal parameters of the corresponding motor performance [10,16,17]

Summary

Introduction

Motor Imagery (MI) is the mental representation of a motor act without engaging in its actual execution. While some intrinsic features of the task might impact its imagined duration, the sport imagery literature acknowledges that the construction of the temporal organization of MI is primarily based on the temporal parameters of the corresponding motor performance [10,16,17]. Actual motor experiences participate to the central elaboration of forward models [18], i.e., an internal simulation of the movement derived from the efferent copy of the motor command, predicting future body states and stimulating the sensory consequences of the expected actions [18,19,20,21]. We investigated whether reduced physiological arousal during static apnea was likely to affect the temporal organization of motor imagery (MI)

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Results

Conclusion