Ease Of Imagery Research Articles

Behavioural indexes of movement imagery ability are associated with the magnitude of corticospinal adaptation following movement imagery training

Movement imagery (MI) is a cognitive process wherein an individual simulates themselves performing a movement in the absence of physical movement. The current paper reports an examination of the relationship between behavioural indexes of MI ability and the magnitude of corticospinal adaptation following MI training. Behavioural indexes of MI ability included data from a questionnaire (MIQ-3), a mental chronometry task, and a hand laterality judgment task. For the measure of corticospinal adaptation, single-pulse transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) was administered to elicit thumb movements to determine the representation of thumb movements before and after MI training. MI training involved participants imagining themselves moving their thumb in the opposite direction to the dominant direction of the TMS-evoked movements prior to training. Pre/post-training changes in the direction and velocity of TMS-evoked thumb movements indicated the magnitude of adaptation following MI training. The two main findings were: 1) a positive relationship was found between the MIQ-3 and the pre/post-training changes in the direction of TMS-evoked thumb movements; and 2) a negative relationship between the mental chronometry measure and both measures of corticospinal adaptation following MI training. These results indicate that both ease of imagery and timing of imagery could predict the magnitude of neuroplastic adaptation following MI training. Thus, both these measures may be considered when assessing imagery ability and determining who might benefit from MI interventions.

Source Memory for Mental Imagery: Influences of the Stimuli’s Ease of Imagery

The present study investigated how ease of imagery influences source monitoring accuracy. Two experiments were conducted in order to examine how ease of imagery influences the probability of source confusions of perceived and imagined completions of natural symmetric shapes. The stimuli consisted of binary pictures of natural objects, namely symmetric pictures of birds, butterflies, insects, and leaves. The ease of imagery (indicating the similarity of the sources) and the discriminability (indicating the similarity of the items) of each stimulus were estimated in a pretest and included as predictors of the memory performance for these stimuli. It was found that confusion of the sources becomes more likely when the imagery process was relatively easy. However, if the different processes of source monitoring—item memory, source memory and guessing biases—are disentangled, both experiments support the assumption that the effect of decreased source memory for easily imagined stimuli is due to decision processes and misinformation at retrieval rather than encoding processes and memory retention. The data were modeled with a Bayesian hierarchical implementation of the one high threshold source monitoring model.

Effects of Risk-Focused and Recommendation-Focused Mental Imagery on Occupational Risk Communication

This study examined the impact of mental imagery instructions in a National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) safety document conveying risk and safety information to farmers. A sample of 314 farmers recruited from a large Southeastern state fair was randomly assigned to conditions in a 2 × 2 design. Participants received a NIOSH safety document about skid steer loader safety in which 2 types of mental imagery instructions were manipulated: (a) risk-focused (imagery vs. control) and (b) recommendation-focused (imagery vs. control). Results indicate that risk-focused imagery influenced perceptions of susceptibility to workplace accidents, whereas recommendation-focused imagery influenced attitudes toward engaging in safety behaviors, intentions to share safety information with others, and perceptions of the safety message. Further analyses indicated that ease of imagery partially mediated the relationship between the imagery manipulations and these outcomes. Other potential mechanisms for these effects are discussed.

Impact of concreteness on comprehensibility, interest, and memory for text: Implications for dual coding theory and text design.

The comprehensibility, interestingness, familiarity, and memorability of concrete and abstract instructional text were investigated in 4 experiments. Experiment 1 investigated relationships between ratings of concreteness, familiarity, interestingness, and comprehensibility in concrete and abstract sentences about historical figures. Experiment 2 investigated the immediate and delayed recall of those sentences, and employed rating norms from Experiment 1 as predictors of recall. Experiments 3 and 4 replicated aspects of Experiments 1 and 2 with paragraphs of varying length. Results indicated that concreteness (ease of Imagery) was the variable overwhelmingly most related to comprehensibility and recall