Autonomic Changes In Motor Imagery

The purpose of this lab was for us to better understand and make a connection to how our motor units work in correlation with our skeletal muscle, and how fast the muscles contract when activated. When attempting to find the correlation that we was looking for, our class volunteer, Spencer would press a button every time he heard a “beep” noise, this in turn reflected his reaction times, and began to help us understand how our motor units work directly with our skeletal muscle system. How this works is that when Spencer would hear the sound, his central nervous system would almost instantly react causing him to press the button, most reflexes are very simple movements that we all perform on a daily basis, but on the other hand many reflexes

Hall (2001) suggests that “imagery can serve as an effective supplement to regular physical practice and as a substitute for some amounts of physical practice when athletes are unable to train.” This can be somewhat supported by Feltz and Landers (1983) who believe mental practise is better than no practise. Imagery comes in two forms, internal and external (Cox, 1997) ; an example of internal imagery would be the athlete envisages themselves, through their own eyes, as appose to external imagery when you imagine your self-performing and watching yourself out side of your body, rather than through your own eyes (Cox, 1997). This supports the idea, of that if the athlete can envisage themselves performing well, the same effective is likely to take place on their actual performance thus increasing confidence.

Prefrontal cortex is the main area to serve short-term memory and coincidently where IOR takes place (Aron, Robbins & Poldrack, 2004; Broersen, Heinsbroek, de Bruin, Uylings, & Olivier, 1995). It is suggested that observation of performance of another individual leads to motor learning due to a kind of motor memory (Stefan et al, 2005). Therefore, motor memory is formed by observation. However, it is unknown that whether the motor memory

Kinesthetic strategies are carefully planned activities that consider the content and the learner. If we understand that kinesthetic learners require learning by doing to process new and difficult information, then kinesthetic strategies align that approach with the information to be taught, carefully

The aim of the current study was to assess the ANS changes associated with RA from the clinical and electrophysiological point of view.

In the end, the action game players were up to 25 percent faster at making conclusions and were just as accurate as the other group. This study concludes that action video game players’ brains are more efficient at collecting visual and auditory information and make faster and just as accurate decisions (Video Games Lead to Faster Decisions). The study stated that the reason why action video game players can make faster decisions is because they use a process that is probabilistic inference. According to the same article, probabilistic inference is when the brain continuously gathers multiple small pieces of visual or auditory information as a person looks at a scene, eventually gathering enough information for the person to make an accurate

Motor imagery (MI) is defined as cognitive process in which the subjects imagine that they perform movements without actually performing movement and muscle contraction [1].

Mental imagery is a powerful tool. Mental imagery activates the same neurons in regions of the brain as performing the actual task or being at an actual event does. The point-of-view that the action or event is being imagined is has an effect on how the event is perceived. Previous studies focused on the emotion attached to each perspective (Holmes, Coughtrey, and Connor, 877) and the difference between looking forward to an event compared to looking back on an event in the past (Van Boven & Ashworth, 291). Our study compares first and third person perception and the effects on the vividness and the looking forward to an event. We hypothesized that

Farah’s experiments showed that visual mental imagery tasks activated areas of the brain responsible for vision and image processing, shown by large increases in blood flow. When participants were given tasks involving rotation of mental models, there was also activation in parts of the brain associated with motor skills (Farah, 1984). Hubbard determined that visual representations of objects can evoke associated auditory images, which prime the listener for later auditory perceptions. When participants were played sounds associated with displayed images, both primary and secondary areas associated with audio were activated, but when asked to imagine an associated sound, only the secondary area activated. The second association area also activates when there are silent gaps in music, suggesting that these areas of the brain are not limited to perception of stimuli, but also forming and transforming mental images related to those senses (Hubbard, 2010). These associations indicate that processes involving mental imagery do use image processing, and are not manipulated and converted into a linguistic language of thought as the descriptivist tradition

Also for this study, we will be using monkeys as our subjects since monkeys have a higher cerebral size and it can be easily conditioned to play tasks. Yet our main goal for using monkeys is because researcher have found two pathways known as the PRR and PRd in the parietal region of a monkey’s brain that can leads to signals from both the motor and somatosensory brain. That means, for this experiment, we will be limiting ourselves from obtaining signals from the motor cortex since there is still unreliability of what the motor system does and does

This tested whether the child's own experience would influence whether they would imitate a model precisely in achievement of the goal. In the experiment, three stacked drawers, with a toy in each drawer, were used as well as three cars, situated in three lanes. The diffucult-experience group had a drawer with putty impeding the ability to open the drawer. The first car had filament attached to it so that, if the fishing reel was enabled, the car would be difficult to move. If the reel was disabled, the car would move unimpeded. All twenty-four children were given prior experience with the materials. They were told to either open the first drawer or move the first car down the lane. After the prior experience, the experimenter would show the children how they opened the second drawer or moved the second car. The experimenter would push a button on the face of the second drawer (which actually did not function) and would move the second car by using their extended index and middle fingers. The experimenters used scorers who knew nothing about the hypothesis or which group the children were in to gather the data. They measured the time it took the children to perform the task, the verbal comments that the children used (e.g., “It's hard), and whether or not the child imitated the experimenter's action by using videos taken of the subjects. The result of the experiment showed that children were significantly more likely to imitate the experimenter's

In 1975, Schmidt proposed his Schema Theory of Motor Learning. This theory was produced as an alternative theory to Adams’ Closed Loop Theory (1971). Schmidt (1982, p.482) says “In 1975, largely due to my dissatisfaction with Adams’ position, I formulated a theory that can be considered a rival to Adams’.” Schmidt had concerns about Adams’ theory, that it didn’t place enough emphasis on open loop control processes. According to Schmidt (1982) a major limitation of this theory is that it focuses on slow, linear-positioning responses, which are not representative of the many other different kinds of skills we use in everyday life.

McKenzie, and Howe (1997) also studied the effects of imagery within a task of dart throwing, and concluded that imagery could aid the performance in such a task. Interestingly though, individuals who had prior experience within the area, elicited a belief in the performance enhancement of imagery. However, Cumming, and Hall (2002) showed that athletes of different levels (National, Provincial, Recreational) show different belief’s on imagery suggesting an engagement with the

The current experiment investigated different contexts in which the activity of frontal motor regions (primary motor and premotor cortices) could be associated to the action component of words. Unlike previous studies, we did not dichotomize words into action and non-action categories. Instead, we created 4 levels of action ranging from very low action (level1) to very high action (level4) using behavioral data provided by our fMRI participants, with the intention of taking their experiences with words’ referents into account. Additionally, the creation of several action levels allowed us to evaluate, for the first time, whether the activity of the frontal motor system was linearly connected to the action component of words or not.

The study conducted produced evidence to support the results of Willingham, Wells, Farrell & Stemwedel (2000) as they revealed that the reaction times significantly increased when participants crossed their hands. The increase demonstrates one’s inability to perform the task differently to the way it was learned in the training phase suggesting that learning was motoric. In regards to accuracies, a significant effect was found for the placement of hands yet there was no significant difference between the proportion of correct response for repeated and random sequences and no significant interaction between these two factors creating an assumption that reaction times and accuracies are not directly linked.