Effect of skill proficiency on motor imagery ability between amateur dancers and non-dancers

Abstract

Evidence has shown that athletes with high motor skill proficiency possess higher motor imagery ability than those with low motor skill proficiency. However, less is known whether this superiority in motor imagery ability emerges over amateur athletes. To address the issue, the present study aimed to investigate the individual differences in motor imagery ability between amateur dancers and non-dancers. Forty participants completed a novel dance movement reproduction task and measures of the vividness of visual imagery questionnaire (VVIQ) and the vividness of motor imagery questionnaire (VMIQ). The results showed that, relative to non-dancers, amateur dancers had higher ability of motor imagery to reproduce the lower-limb and upper-limb dance movements during the dance movement reproduction task. Besides, amateur dancers displayed higher abilities of the visual motor imagery and the kinesthetic imagery, but comparable visual imagery ability as the non-dancers. These findings suggest that the mental representation of motors but not the visual is affected by the motor skill levels, due to the motor imagery practice in sports amateurs.

Motor imagery in autism: a systematic review

“…Therefore, employing MI techniques may well be beneficial for some autistic people, although an individual approach is likely to be most appropriate. Indeed, MI ability in typical populations is variable ( Moran et al, 2012 ; Cumming and Eaves, 2018 ) and influenced by multiple factors such as sporting and dance experience, MI practice, motor and cognitive ability and tactile discrimination ( Isaac and Marks, 1994 ; Arvinen-Barrow et al, 2007 ; Pelletier et al, 2018 ; Krüger et al, 2020 ; Dhouibi et al, 2021 ; Mao et al, 2022 ). Therefore, future research examining MI ability and impact of MI training on motor coordination in autistic populations will need to take into account individual differences.…”

Experience in sports and music influences implicit motor imagery

“…The use of MI within dance may also contribute to beneficial effects of dance for people with neurological conditions such as Parkinson's disease (Bek et al, 2020;Bek, Groves, et al, 2021;Bek, Leventhal, et al, 2022). Dance training has been associated with changes in the use of imagery, such as an increased reliance on kinesthetic MI (Golomer et al, 2008;Nordin & Cumming, 2006), and amateur dancers showed increased vividness of both visual and kinesthetic MI compared to non-dancers (Mao et al, 2022). However, findings are inconsistent, and other studies found no difference in MI ability according to dance expertise (Carey et al, 2019), or greater ease of visual MI compared to kinesthetic MI in dancers (Paris-Alemany et al, 2019).…”

EEG topography preserving convolutional neural network approach to assess skill levels during laparoscopic surgical training

“…With skill learning, the central nervous system can internally simulate motor behavior in planning, controlling, and incremental learning, comparing the prediction of sensory inputs to feedback information and determining discrepancies implied by the concept of an internal model (Wolpert and Miall, 1996), (Kawato, 1999), (Kamat et al, 2022). Here, internal simulation of motor behavior without overt motor action, e.g., during kinesthetic motor imagery (Stevens, 2005), may be subserved by motor skill proficiency (Mao et al, 2022). Then, the computing brain circuit mechanisms (Gu et al, 2021), subserved by motor skill proficiency, may represent dissociable selective attention (Crick, 1984) or local excitability alterations in the cortex during motor planning and execution that is postulated to be driven by supplementary motor area, premotor cortex, and cerebellum (Guillot et al, 2009) all communicating via the thalamus (Hughes, 2004) and the cortico-thalamic loops (Collins & Anastasiades, 2019), (Guo et al, 2018).…”