Yoxon Emma, Tremblay Luc, Welsh Timothy N
Faculty of Kinesiology & Physical Education, Centre for Motor Control, University of Toronto, 55 Harbord Street, Toronto, ON M5S 2W6, Canada.
Neurosci Lett. 2015 Jan 12;585:72-6. doi: 10.1016/j.neulet.2014.11.021. Epub 2014 Nov 18.
Ideomotor theory states that the neural codes that represent action and the perceptual consequences of those actions are tightly bound in a common code. For action imagination, bound action, and perceptual codes are thought to be internally activated at a sub-threshold level through action simulation. In support of this hypothesis, previous research revealed that imagined movement times (MTs) for reciprocal aiming movements were closer to actual execution MTs after the participants gained experience executing the task. The current study examined the task-specific nature of the effects of experience on imagination by determining if improvements in accuracy in the imagination of reciprocal aiming movements occur only with experience of the reciprocal aiming task or with any aiming task. To this end, one group of participants executed a reciprocal pointing task, whereas a second group executed a discrete aiming task with comparable accuracy requirements before and after imagining reciprocal aiming movements. Influence of task specificity on imagination was assessed by evaluating the changes in imagined MTs before and after execution. Consistent with previous findings, there was a reduction in imagined MTs following task execution. Critically, there was a significant time by group interaction revealing a significant pre/post reduction in imagined MTs for the group that executed the reciprocal aiming movements, but not for the group that executed the discrete aiming movements. These data support ideomotor accounts of action imagination because it appears that the imagination of a movement is affected by task-specific experience with that movement.
观念运动理论认为,代表动作及其动作感知结果的神经编码在一个共同的编码中紧密相连。对于动作想象,通过动作模拟,绑定的动作和感知编码被认为在阈下水平被内部激活。为支持这一假设,先前的研究表明,在参与者获得执行任务的经验后,反向瞄准动作的想象运动时间(MTs)更接近实际执行的MTs。当前的研究通过确定反向瞄准动作想象准确性的提高是否仅发生在反向瞄准任务的经验中,还是发生在任何瞄准任务中,来检验经验对想象影响的任务特异性本质。为此,一组参与者执行反向指向任务,而另一组在想象反向瞄准动作之前和之后执行具有可比准确性要求的离散瞄准任务。通过评估执行前后想象MTs的变化来评估任务特异性对想象的影响。与先前的研究结果一致,任务执行后想象MTs减少。关键的是,存在显著的时间×组交互作用,表明执行反向瞄准动作的组在想象MTs上有显著的执行前/后减少,而执行离散瞄准动作的组则没有。这些数据支持动作想象的观念运动解释,因为似乎一个动作的想象受到该动作的任务特异性经验的影响。