Asymmetries between dominant and non-dominanthands in real and imagined motor task performance

Maruff, Paul; Wilson, Peter H.; Fazio, J.De; Cerritelli, Belinda; Hedt, A.; Currie, Jay D.

doi:10.1016/s0028-3932(98)00064-5

Cited by 119 publications

(72 citation statements)

References 4 publications

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“…These results are appealing and suggest that motor intentions, executed or simulated, are comparable in young and elderly individuals. High temporal correspondence between overt and covert execution in elderly subjects constitutes a novel result, which expands the welldocumented idea, up to now established in young individuals, of a similar cognitive substrate between overt and covert movement execution [4,7,10,16,27,[34][35][36].…”

Section: Young and Elderly Subjects Presented Similar Behaviour Regarsupporting

confidence: 72%

“…Consequently, the temporal underestimation of the motor task during internal simulation may be explained by the fact that subjects, during motor imagery, do not need to visually control the stand-to-sit phase, since movement does not occur, and as a consequence they reduce the duration of this phase and thus the duration of the whole movement. It must be noted that temporal dissimilarities between actual and imagined movements has been already observed in both young [3,7,27] and elderly people [42]. However, further studies are certainly needed to determine the functional significance of this temporal dissociation.…”

Section: Young and Elderly Subjects Presented Similar Behaviour Regarmentioning

confidence: 97%

“…It has also been shown that muscular force is enhanced by an 'imagined' training [39,51] and that autonomic activation is increased, compared to rest, when subjects imagine motor actions with large physical effort [8,9,33]. Interestingly, several studies showed that motor images of various motor tasks (arm pointing, writing and walking) preserve the same spatiotemporal characteristics and obey the same motor rules or biomechanical constraints as their actual counterparts [4,7,10,16,27,[34][35][36].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Mentally represented motor actions in normal agingI. Age effects on the temporal features of overt and covert execution of actions

Skoura

Papaxanthis

Vinter

et al. 2005

Behavioural Brain Research

105

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The present study examines the temporal features of overt and covert actions as a function of normal aging. In the first experiment, we tested three motor tasks (walking, sit-stand-sit, arm pointing) that did not imply any particular spatiotemporal constraints, and we compared the duration of their overt and covert execution in three different groups of age (mean ages: 22.5, 66.2 and 73.4 years). We found that the ability of generating motor images did not differentiate elderly subjects from young subjects. Precisely, regarding overt and covert durations, subjects presented similarities for the walking and pointing tasks and dissimilarities for the stand-sit-stand task. Furthermore, the timing variability of imagined movements was always greater compared to actual movements and was of the same amount in the three groups of age. In the second experiment, we investigated the effect of age (three groups with mean ages: 22, 64.8 and 73.2 years) upon temporal characteristics of covert and overt movements involving strong spatiotemporal constraints (speed/accuracy trade-off paradigm). During overt execution young and elderly subjects respected Fitts's law despite the fact that movement speed progressively decreased with age. Thus, while execution is deteriorated, the motor preparation process is still intact in old age, and follows well-known laws of biological motions. For covert execution, movement speed progressively decreased with age but elderly subjects did not respect Fitts's law. This suggests that the generation and control of motor intentions that consciously do not come to execution, particularly those concerning complex motor actions are progressively perturbed in the aging brain.

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Section: Young and Elderly Subjects Presented Similar Behaviour Regarsupporting

confidence: 72%

Section: Young and Elderly Subjects Presented Similar Behaviour Regarmentioning

confidence: 97%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Mentally represented motor actions in normal agingI. Age effects on the temporal features of overt and covert execution of actions

Skoura

Papaxanthis

Vinter

et al. 2005

Behavioural Brain Research

105

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Here we take advantage of the well-known and robust isochrony between imagined and executed movements (Decety et al 1989;Gentili et al 2004;Maruff et al 1999;Papaxanthis et al 2002) to compare motor learning during physical and motor-imagery training. To obtain valid and reliable measurements in motor imagery protocols, several movements are necessary because of the shortduration of a single movement and the coarse resolution of mental movement time measurements (Cerritelli et al 2000;Papaxanthis et al 2002;Sirigu et al 1996).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Psychophysical experiments have shown that imagined and executed movements have the same spatiotemporal characteristics and obey the same motor rules and biomechanical constraints (Cerritelli et al 2000;Courtine et al 2004;Decety et al 1989;Gentili et al 2004;Maruff et al 1999;Papaxanthis et al 2003). Furthermore, neurophysiological studies have reported that mentally simulated and physically executed movements trigger similar motor representations and share overlapping neural substrates (Ehrsson et al 2003;Jeannerod 2001;Papaxanthis et al 2003;Sirigu et al 1996).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Motor Learning Without Doing: Trial-by-Trial Improvement in Motor Performance During Mental Training

Gentili

Han²,

Schweighofer

et al. 2010

Journal of Neurophysiology

192

146

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. Although there is converging experimental and clinical evidences suggesting that mental training with motor imagery can improve motor performance, it is unclear how humans can learn movements through mental training despite the lack of sensory feedback from the body and the environment. In a first experiment, we measured the trial-by-trial decrease in durations of executed movements (physical training group) and mentally simulated movements (motor-imagery training group), by means of training on a multiple-target arm-pointing task requiring high accuracy and speed. Movement durations were significantly lower in posttest compared with pretest after both physical and motor-imagery training. Although both the posttraining performance and the rate of learning were smaller in motor-imagery training group than in physical training group, the change in movement duration and the asymptotic movement duration after a hypothetical large number of trials were identical. The two control groups (eye-movement training and rest groups) did not show change in movement duration. In the second experiment, additional kinematic analyses revealed that arm movements were straighter and faster both immediately and 24 h after physical and motor-imagery training. No such improvements were observed in the eye-movement training group. Our results suggest that the brain uses state estimation, provided by internal forward model predictions, to improve motor performance during mental training. Furthermore, our results suggest that mental practice can, at least in young healthy subjects and if given after a short bout of physical practice, be successfully substituted to physical practice to improve motor performance.

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Contribution of the primary motor cortex to motor imagery: A subthreshold TMS study

Pelgrims¹,

Michaux²,

Olivier³

et al. 2010

Human Brain Mapping

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Motor imagery (MI) mostly activates the same brain regions as movement execution (ME) including the primary motor cortex (Brodmann area 4, BA4). However, whether BA4 is functionally relevant for MI remains controversial. The finding that MI tasks are impaired by BA4 virtual lesions induced by transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) supports this view, though previous studies do not permit to exclude that BA4 is also involved in other processes such as hand recognition. Additionally, previous works largely underestimated the possible negative consequences of TMS-induced muscle twitches on MI task performance. Here we investigated the role of BA4 in MI by interfering with the function of the left or right BA4 in healthy subjects performing a MI task in which they had to make laterality judgements on rotated hand drawings. We used a subthreshold repetitive TMS protocol and monitored electromyographic activity to exclude undesirable effects of hand muscle twitches. We found that BA4 virtual lesions selectively increased reaction times in laterality judgments on hand drawings, leaving unaffected a task of equal difficulty, involving judgments on letters. Interestingly, the effects of virtual lesions of left and right BA4 on MI task performance were the same irrespective of the laterality (left/right) of hand drawings. A second experiment allowed us to rule out the possibility that BA4 lesions affect visual or semantic processing of hand drawings. Altogether, these results indicate that BA4 contribution to MI tasks is specifically related to the mental simulation process and further emphasize the functional coupling between ME and MI.

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Asymmetries between dominant and non-dominanthands in real and imagined motor task performance

Cited by 119 publications

References 4 publications

Mentally represented motor actions in normal agingI. Age effects on the temporal features of overt and covert execution of actions

Mentally represented motor actions in normal agingI. Age effects on the temporal features of overt and covert execution of actions

Motor Learning Without Doing: Trial-by-Trial Improvement in Motor Performance During Mental Training

Contribution of the primary motor cortex to motor imagery: A subthreshold TMS study

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