Mental practice: rehearsal strategies and sensorimotor outcomes

Mental practice (MP) is the cognitive rehearsal of a task in the absence of overt physical movements. It has been shown that MP allows performance improvements in various tasks, but little is known about the effectiveness of different strategies of MP and about the exact sensorimotor mechanisms that underlie this improvement. Several strategies of MP are here investigated in relation to the practice outcome. In particular, in the context of music performance, it is shown that pitch imagery is strongly associated with better performance, regardless of the specific nature of the musical task. Conversely, structural/formal analysis appears to be important for music memorization, and motor imagery for fine motor control. In terms of sensorimotor outcomes of the practice, it is shown that MP results in improvements of movement velocity, movement anticipation and coarticulation. Additional experiments from force-field learning paradigm show that MP can also result in changes of somatosensory perception. Results are discussed in the context of the simulation theories of motor control.