Different performances in static and dynamic imagery and real locomotion. An exploratory trial

Abstract

Motor imagery (MI) is a mental representation of an action without its physical execution. Recently, the simultaneous movement of the body has been added to the mental simulation. This refers to dynamic motor imagery (dMI). This study was aimed at analyzing the temporal features for static and dMI in different locomotor conditions (natural walking, NW, light running, LR, lateral walking, LW, backward walking, BW), and whether these performances were more related to all the given conditions or present only in walking. We have been also evaluated the steps performed in the dMI in comparison with the ones performed by real locomotion. 20 healthy participants (29.3 ± 5.1 years old) were asked to move towards a visualized target located at 10 mt. In dMI, no significant temporal differences respect the actual locomotion were found for all the given tasks (NW: p = 0.058, LR: p = 0.636, BW: p = 0.096; LW: p = 0,487). Significant temporal differences between static imagery and actual movements were found for LR (p < 0.001) and LW (p < 0.001), due to an underestimation of time needed to achieve the target in imagined locomotion. Significant differences in terms of number of steps among tasks were found for LW (p < 0.001) and BW (p = 0.036), whereas neither in NW (p = 0.124) nor LR (p = 0.391) between dMI and real locomotion. Our results confirmed that motor imagery is a task-dependent process, with walking being temporally closer than other locomotor conditions. Moreover, the time records of dMI are nearer to the ones of actual locomotion respect than the ones of static motor imagery.

Why is the Duration of Imagined Walking Underproduced? A dual-representation view on the mental imagery of locomotion

“…Walking is one of the most fundamental actions that humans perform. A number of studies have been carried out to investigate mental simulation of walking, and results from these studies are consistent with the general findings summarized above: In overt behavior, the time it IMAGINED WALKING 6 takes participants to imagine walking a given distance varies systematically as a function of the walked distance (and thus as a function of the time it takes them to physically walk the same distance; Bakker, de Lange, Stevens, Toni, & Bloem, 2007;Courtine, Papaxanthis, Gentili, & Pozzo, 2004;Decety, Jeannerod, & Prablanc, 1989;Fusco et al, 2014;Papaxanthis, Pozzo, Skoura, & Schieppati, 2002;Personnier, Kubicki, Laroche, & Papaxanthis, 2010;Plumert, Kearney, Cremer, & Recker, 2005;Saimpont, Malouin, Tousignant, & Jackson, 2012;Schott & Munzert, 2007); and in the brain, movement-related areas such as the premotor cortex, supplementary motor area, and cerebellum are commonly activated while participants perform real and imagined walking (Bakker et al, 2008;Hamacher et al, 2015;Hanakawa et al, 1999;Harada, Miyai, Suzuki, & Kubota, 2009;Jahn et al, 2004;la Fougère et al, 2010;Miyai et al, 2001;van der Meulen, Allali, Rieger, Assal, & Vuilleumier, 2014). However, one notable observation is that participants often underproduce imagined walking times relative to real walking times that they spend actually walking the same distances (Grechkin, Nguyen, Plumert, Cremer, & Kearney, 2010;Kunz et al, 2009;Munzert, Blischke, & Krüger, 2015;Stevens, 2005).…”

“…Together, these findings suggest that by using eyes-open real walking, the difference between real and imagined walking times was decreased in the Schott and Munzert study. Courtine et al (2004), Fusco et al (2014), Papaxanthis et al (2002), and Personnier et al (2010) found similar real and imagined walking times from non-specific young adult samples without particularly stressing the importance of vividness of motor imagery. Unlike the other experiments discussed here, however, participants in these studies were repeatedly exposed to one particular target distance only.…”

“…The first step of this investigation was to replicate the underproduction of imagined walking duration. Although multiple research groups independently found this pattern (Grechkin et al, 2010;Kunz et al, 2009;Munzert et al, 2015;Stevens, 2005), there are also studies in IMAGINED WALKING 7 which real and imagined walking times were comparable to each other (Bakker et al, 2007;Courtine et al, 2004;Fusco et al, 2014;Papaxanthis et al, 2002;Personnier et al, 2010;Schott & Munzert, 2007). Given this discrepancy in the literature, replication of the underproduction tendency would be crucial for the present study.…”

“…One key finding in the imagined walking literature is that marching in place during imagined walking makes imagined walking times comparable to real walking times (Kunz et al, 2009; see also Fusco et al, 2014). Kunz et al interpreted implicitly expressed in the procedural memory (Michon, 1990).…”

Eyes wide shut: How visual cues affect brain patterns of simulated gait

“…However, whatever the outcome of our experiments, what counts here is that our experimental design allowed us to test the opposites outcomes of the two scenarios, without being biased by our initial expectations, as we describe next. As a last note, we anticipate that our fMRI task also allowed us to test whether the presence of visual cues has a different effect depending on the specific imagery task: in the present study, as we did in some of our previous studies Sacheli et al, 2020; Sacheli et al, 2018; Sacheli et al, 2017, we compared simple motor imagery with a condition that combines motor imagery with body movements (Dynamic Motor Imagery, Fusco et al, 2016; Fusco et al, 2019; Fusco et al, 2014; Guillot, Moschberger, & Collet, 2013; Kanthack et al, 2016).…”