Department of Molecular Medicine, Kyungpook National University College of Medicine, Kyungpook National University Hospital, Daegu, South Korea.
NMR Biomed. 2011 May;24(4):366-72. doi: 10.1002/nbm.1600. Epub 2010 Dec 12.
Motor imagery is a mental rehearsal of simple or complex motor acts without overt body movement. It has been proposed that the association between performance and the mental rehearsal period that precedes the voluntary movement is an important point of difference between highly trained athletes and beginners. We compared the activation maps of elite archers and nonarchers during mental rehearsal of archery to test whether the neural correlates of elite archers were more focused and efficiently organised than those of nonarchers. Brain activation was measured using functional MRI in 18 right-handed elite archers and 18 right-handed nonarchers. During the active functional MRI imagery task, the participants were instructed to mentally rehearse their archery shooting from a first-person perspective. The active imagery condition was tested against the nonmotor imagery task as a control condition. The results showed that the premotor and supplementary motor areas, and the inferior frontal region, basal ganglia and cerebellum, were active in nonarchers, whereas elite archers showed activation primarily in the supplementary motor areas. In particular, our result of higher cerebellar activity in nonarchers indicates the increased participation of the cerebellum in nonarchers when learning an unfamiliar archery task. Therefore, the difference in cerebellar activation between archers and nonarchers provides evidence of the expertise effect in the mental rehearsal of archery. In conclusion, the relative economy in the cortical processes of elite archers could contribute to greater consistency in performing the specific challenge in which they are highly practised.
运动想象是一种不进行明显身体运动的简单或复杂运动行为的心理演练。有人提出，在自愿运动之前的心理演练期间，表现与运动之间的关联是高技能运动员和初学者之间的重要区别点。我们比较了优秀射箭运动员和非射箭运动员在射箭心理演练期间的激活图，以测试优秀射箭运动员的神经相关性是否比非射箭运动员更集中和有效地组织。我们使用功能磁共振成像（fMRI）测量了 18 名右利手的优秀射箭运动员和 18 名右利手的非射箭运动员的大脑激活。在主动 fMRI 想象任务中，要求参与者从第一人称视角心理演练他们的射箭射击。主动想象条件作为对照条件与非运动想象任务进行了测试。结果表明，在非射箭运动员中，运动前区和辅助运动区以及下额叶区域、基底神经节和小脑活跃，而优秀的射箭运动员主要在辅助运动区显示出激活。特别是，我们在非射箭运动员中观察到更高的小脑活动的结果表明，在学习不熟悉的射箭任务时，小脑的参与度增加。因此，射箭运动员和非射箭运动员之间小脑激活的差异为射箭心理演练中的专长效应提供了证据。总之，优秀射箭运动员在皮质过程中的相对经济性可能有助于在他们高度熟练的特定挑战中表现出更大的一致性。
