Kawasaki Tsubasa, Higuchi Takahiro
Department of Health Promotion Science, Graduate School of Human Health Science, Tokyo Metropolitan University, 1-1 Minami-Osawa, Hachioji, Tokyo 192-0397, Japan.
Rehabil Res Pract. 2013;2013:890962. doi: 10.1155/2013/890962. Epub 2013 Dec 26.
The present study was designed to investigate whether an intervention during which participants were involved in mental rotation (MR) of a foot stimulus would have immediate beneficial effects on postural stability (Experiment 1) and to confirm whether it was the involvement of MR of the foot, rather than simply viewing foot stimuli, that could improve postural stability (Experiment 2). Two different groups of participants (n = 16 in each group) performed MR intervention of foot stimuli in each of the two experiments. Pre- and postmeasurements of postural stability during unipedal and bipedal standing were made using a force plate for the intervention. Consistently, postural sway values for unipedal standing, but not for bipedal standing, were decreased immediately after the MR intervention using the foot stimuli. Such beneficial effects were not observed after the MR intervention using car stimuli (Experiment 1) or when participants observed the same foot stimuli during a simple reaction task (Experiment 2). These findings suggest that the MR intervention using the foot stimuli could contribute to improving postural stability, at least when it was measured immediately after the intervention, under a challenging standing condition (i.e., unipedal standing).
本研究旨在调查参与者参与足部刺激的心理旋转（MR）干预是否会对姿势稳定性产生即时有益影响（实验1），并确认是足部的MR参与，而非仅仅观看足部刺激，能够改善姿势稳定性（实验2）。在两个实验中，两组不同的参与者（每组n = 16）对足部刺激进行了MR干预。使用测力板对干预过程中的单脚和双脚站立时的姿势稳定性进行前后测量。一致的是，在使用足部刺激进行MR干预后，单脚站立而非双脚站立的姿势摆动值立即降低。在使用汽车刺激进行MR干预后（实验1）或参与者在简单反应任务中观察相同足部刺激时（实验2），未观察到这种有益效果。这些发现表明，至少在具有挑战性的站立条件下（即单脚站立），干预后立即测量时，使用足部刺激的MR干预有助于改善姿势稳定性。
