Motor imagery

[3] Motor imagery can be defined as a dynamic state during which an individual mentally simulates a physical action.

But unlike its use in sports, to improve a skill, mental practice is used in medicine as a form of stress reduction before operations.

[14] Additionally, there was insufficient scientific evidence to assess the influence of MI on the dependence on personal assistance and walking endurance.

These methods have revealed that motor images retain many of the properties, in terms of temporal regularities, programming rules and biomechanical constraints, which are observed in the corresponding real action when it comes to execution.

The gates were presented to the participants with a 3-D visual display (a virtual reality helmet) which involved no calibration with external cues and no possibility for the subject to refer to a known environment.

[15][16] This finding led neurophysiologists Marc Jeannerod and Jean Decety to propose that there is a similarity in mental states between action simulation and execution.

When this is the case, EMG activity is limited to those muscles that participate in the simulated action and tends to be proportional to the amount of imagined effort.

An individual who is engaging in simulation may replay his own past experience in order to extract from it pleasurable, motivational or strictly informational properties.

In this context, the basic idea of simulation is that the attributor attempts to mimic the mental activity of the target by using his own psychological resources.

[34] In order to understand the mental state of another when observing the other acting, the individual imagines herself/himself performing the same action, a covert simulation that does not lead to an overt behavior.