Search results for "Imagination"
showing 10 items of 155 documents
Illusion of Pain: Pre-existing Knowledge Determines Brain Activation of ‘Imagined Allodynia’
2007
Abstract Allodynia means that innocuous tactile stimulation is felt as pain. Accordingly, cerebral activations during allodynia or touch should markedly differ. The aim of this study was to investigate whether the imagination of allodynia affects brain processing of touch in healthy subjects. Seventeen healthy subjects divided into 2 subgroups were investigated: The first group (n = 7) was familiar with allodynia, based on previous pain studies, whereas the second group (n = 10) had never knowingly experienced allodynia. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, 2 experimental conditions were investigated. In one condition the subjects were simply touched at their left hand, whereas duri…
Factor analysis and reliability of the Movement Imagery Questionnaire.
1994
The purpose of this work was to analyze the factor structure, estimate reliability of the Movement Imagery Questionnaire of Hall and Pongrac, and examine differences between men and women on factor scores. The results for 63 men and 47 women supported the bifactorial structure and reliability of this self-report and its adequacy in comparisons of visual and kinesthetic imagery scores.
Dominant vs. nondominant arm advantage in mentally simulated actions in right handers
2013
Although plentiful data are available regarding mental states involving the dominant-right arm, the evidence for the nondominant-left arm is sparse. Here, we investigated whether right-handers can generate accurate predictions with either the right or the left arm. Fifteen adults carried out actual and mental arm movements in two directions with varying inertial resistance (inertial anisotropy phenomenon). We recorded actual and mental movement times and used the degree of their similarity as an indicator for the accuracy of motor imagery/prediction process. We found timing correspondences (isochrony) between actual and mental right arm movements in both rightward (low inertia resistance) …
For the mind's eye the world is two-dimensional.
2010
The nature of visual mental images is a topic that has puzzled neuroscientists, psychologists, and philosophers alike. On the one hand, mental images might preserve the 3-D properties of our perceptual world. On the other hand, they might be akin to 2-D pictures, such as photographs, paintings, or drawings. In the present study, 16 observers judged where real objects (Experiment 1) or photographs thereof (Experiment 2) were pointing. Both experiments contained a perception condition and an imagery condition. In Experiment 1, there was a significant difference between the pointing errors in the perception and the imagery conditions, whereas there was no such difference in Experiment 2. In im…
Motor Activity Improves Temporal Expectancy
2015
International audience; Certain brain areas involved in interval timing are also important in motor activity. This raises the possibility that motor activity might influence interval timing. To test this hypothesis, we assessed interval timing in healthy adults following different types of training. The pre- and post-training tasks consisted of a button press in response to the presentation of a rhythmic visual stimulus. Alterations in temporal expectancy were evaluated by measuring response times. Training consisted of responding to the visual presentation of regularly appearing stimuli by either: (1) pointing with a whole-body movement, (2) pointing only with the arm, (3) imagining pointi…
Effect of musical expertise on visuospatial abilities: evidence from reaction times and mental imagery.
2003
Abstract Recently, the relationship between music and nonmusical cognitive abilities has been highly debated. It has been documented that formal music training would improve verbal, mathematical or visuospatial performance in children. In the experiments described here, we tested if visual perception and imagery abilities were enhanced in adult musicians compared with nonmusicians. In our main experiment, we measured reaction times of subjects who had to detect on which side of a horizontal or a vertical line a target dot was flashed. In the “imagery” condition the reference line disappeared before the target dot was presented. In order to accomplish the task, subjects had to keep a mental …
Prism adaptation by mental practice
2012
International audience; The prediction of our actions and their interaction with the external environment is critical for sensorimotor adaptation. For instance, during prism exposure, which deviates laterally our visual field, we progressively correct movement errors by combining sensory feedback with forward model sensory predictions. However, very often we project our actions to the external environment without physically interacting with it (e.g., mental actions). An intriguing question is whether adaptation will occur if we imagine, instead of executing, an arm movement while wearing prisms. Here, we investigated prism adaptation during mental actions. In the first experiment, participa…
Kinematic features of movement tunes perception and action coupling
2005
How do we extrapolate the final position of hand trajectory that suddenly vanishes behind a wall? Studies showing maintenance of cortical activity after objects in motion disappear suggest that internal model of action may be recalled to reconstruct the missing part of the trajectory. Although supported by neurophysiological and brain imaging studies, behavioural evidence for this hypothesis is sparse. Further, in humans, it is unknown if the recall of internal model of action at motion observation can be tuned with kinematic features of movement. Here, we propose a novel experiment to address this question. Each stimulus consisted of a dot moving either upwards or downwards, and correspond…
Effect of mental fatigue on speed–accuracy trade-off
2015
International audience; The aim of this study was to investigate the effects of mental fatigue on the duration of actual and imagined goal-directed arm movements involving speed-accuracy trade-off. Ten participants performed actual and imagined point-to-point arm movements as accurately and as fast as possible, before and after a 90-min sustained cognitive task inducing mental fatigue, and before and after viewing a neutral control task (documentary movie) that did not induce mental fatigue. Target width and center-to-center target distance were varied, resulting in five different indexes of difficulty. Prior to mental fatigue, actual and imagined movement duration increased with the diffic…
Mental representation of arm motion dynamics in children and adolescents.
2013
International audience; Motor imagery, i.e., a mental state during which an individual internally represents an action without any overt motor output, is a potential tool to investigate action representation during development. Here, we took advantage of the inertial anisotropy phenomenon to investigate whether children can generate accurate motor predictions for movements with varying dynamics. Children (9 and 11 years), adolescents (14 years) and young adults (21 years) carried-out actual and mental arm movements in two different directions in the horizontal plane: rightwards (low inertia) and leftwards (high inertia). We recorded and compared actual and mental movement times. We found th…