Both motor imagery and mirror training have been used in motor rehabilitation settings to promote skill learning and plasticity. As motor imagery and mirror training are suggested to be closely linked, it was hypothesized that mirror training augmented by motor imagery would increase corticospinal excitability (CSE) significantly compared to mirror training alone. Forty-four participants were s...

Background & aim: Decreased sleep quality is a common complaint during pregnancy. Relaxation is one of the non-pharmaceutical treatments for sleep disorders. Different techniques could have different impacts on various biological and mental stressors. Therefore, this study aimed to compare the effects of progressive muscle relaxation and guided imagery on the sleep quality of primigravida women...

The question whether mental imagery of perceptual and/or motor acts produces activation in the same or overlapping brain areas has fascinated neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists for several decades. For example , in a series of pioneering studies on visual imagery, Kosslyn and colleagues showed that visual imagery is associated with activity in striate and extrastriate cortex (Kosslyn a...

Visual imagery has been closely linked to brain mechanisms involved in perception. Can visual imagery, like visual perception, improve by means of training? Previous research has demonstrated that people can reliably evaluate the vividness of single episodes of imagination - might the metacognition of imagery also improve over the course of training? We had participants imagine colored Gabor pa...

Motor imagery andactualmovement engage similar neural structures, however, whether they produce similar training-related corticospinal adaptations has yet to be established. The aim of this study was to compare changes in strength and corticospinal excitability following shortterm motor imagery strength training and short-term strength training. Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) was appli...

Over the last two decades, the number of studies on motor imagery in children has witnessed a large expansion. Most studies used the hand laterality judgment paradigm or the mental chronometry paradigm to examine motor imagery ability. The main objective of the current review is to collate these studies to provide a more comprehensive insight in children's motor imagery development and its age ...

The ability to form positive mental images may be an important aspect of mental health and well-being. We have previously demonstrated that the vividness of positive prospective imagery is increased in healthy older adults following positive imagery cognitive training. The rostral anterior cingulate cortex (rACC) is involved in the simulation of future affective episodes. Here, we investigate t...

OBJECTIVES The present study aimed to investigate the effects of guided imagery training on heart rate variability in individuals while performing spaceflight emergency tasks. MATERIALS AND METHODS Twenty-one student subjects were recruited for the experiment and randomly divided into two groups: imagery group (n = 11) and control group (n = 10). The imagery group received instructor-guided i...

This study investigated acquisition of a mirror-reading skill via imagery training, without the actual performance of a mirror-reading task. In experiment I, healthy volunteers simulated writing on an imaginary, transparent screen placed at eye level, which could be read by an experimenter facing the subject. Performance of this irrelevant motor task required the subject to imagine the letters ...