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

Abstract

Generally, imagining an action and physically executing it are thought to be controlled by common motor representations. However, imagined walking to a previewed target tends to be terminated more quickly than real walking to the same target, raising a question as to what representations underlie the two modes of walking. To address this question, the present study put forward a hypothesis that both explicit and implicit representations of gait are involved in imagined walking, and further proposed that the underproduction of imagined walking duration largely stems from the explicit representation due to its susceptibility to a general undershooting tendency in time production (i.e., the error of anticipation). Properties of the explicit and implicit representations were examined by manipulating their relative dominance during imagined walking through concurrent bodily motions, and also by using non-spatial tasks that extracted the temporal structure of imagined walking. Results showed that the duration of imagined walking subserved by the implicit representation was equal to that of real walking, and a time production task exhibited an equivalent underproduction bias as in imagined walking tasks that were based on the explicit representation. These findings are interpreted as evidence for the dual-representation view of imagined walking.

DeFINE: Delayed Feedback based Immersive Navigation Environment for Studying Goal-Directed Human Navigation

“…In this method, the participants walk in place, including swinging their arms in a manner consistent with their pace of walking. It has been shown that such arm swings are effective in having participants experience a naturalistic sense of locomotion without actually moving in real space (Kunz, Creem-Regehr, & Thompson, 2009;Yamamoto, Mach, Philbeck, & Van Pelt, 2018). This locomotion method uses the physical movement of the controller(s), held by the participant, to determine forward speed in the VE.…”