Journal
JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY-HUMAN PERCEPTION AND PERFORMANCE
Volume 35, Issue 5, Pages 1458-1471Publisher
AMER PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOC
DOI: 10.1037/a0015786
Keywords
motor imagery; locomotion; spatial updating; space perception
Categories
Funding
- National Science Foundation [IIS-0121084]
Ask authors/readers for more resources
A series of experiments examined the role of the motor system in imagined movement, finding a strong relationship between imagined walking performance and the biomechanical information available during actual walking. Experiments I through 4 established the finding that real and imagined locomotion differ in absolute walking time. We then tested whether executed actions could provide a basis for imagined walking rate using 2 approaches. Experiments 5 and 6 used a perceptual-motor recalibration paradigm, finding that after physically walking in a treadmill virtual reality environment, actors recallibrated the time to imagine walking to a previously viewed target. This finding mirrors previous perceptual-motor recalibration work measuring actual walking to previously viewed targets. Experiments 7 and 8 used a dual-task paradigm in which actions performed concurrently with imagined walking increased the similarity between real and imagined walking time, but only when they were biomechanically consistent with the act of walking. The striking influence of biomechanical information on imagined locomotion provides evidence for shared motor systems in imagined and executed movements and is also directly relevant to the mechanisms involved in egocentric spatial updating of environmental layout.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available