Performance variation is a critical issue in motor imagery brain-computer interface (MI-BCI), and various neurophysiological, psychological, and anatomical correlates have been reported in the literature. Although the main aim of such studies is to predict MI-BCI performance for the prescreening of poor performers, studies which focus on the user's sense of the motor imagery process and directl...

Imagining motor acts is a cognitive task that engages parts of the executive motor system. While motor imagery has been intensively studied using neuroimaging techniques, most studies lack behavioral observations. Here, we used functional MRI to compare the functional neuroanatomy of motor execution and imagery using a task that objectively assesses imagery performance. With surface electromyog...

Motor-activity-related mental tasks are widely adopted for brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) as they are a natural extension of movement intention, requiring no training to evoke brain activity. The ideal BCI aims to eliminate neuromuscular movement, making motor imagery tasks, or imagined actions with no muscle movement, good candidates. This study explores cortical activation differences betwe...

We describe general concepts about motor imagery and differences to motor execution. The problem of controlling what the subject actually does during imagery is emphasized. A major part of the chapter is dealing with mental training by imagery and the usage of motor imagination in athletes, musicians and during rehabilitation. Data of altered representations of the body after loss of afferent i...

Brain-computer interface (BCI) technology has the prospects of helping stroke survivors by enabling the interaction with their environ ment through brain signals rather than through muscles, and restoring motor function by inducing activity-dependent brain plasticity. This paper presents a clinical study on the extent of detectable brain signals from a large population of stroke patients in usi...

Numerous studies have confirmed that motor imagery may result in plastic change in motor system as actual physical activity. However, whether motor imagery can improve muscle strength of the trained persons remains unclear. The aim of this study is to investigate the effect of motor imagery on muscle strength. Totally 12 healthy college students were involved in 4 weeks of mental rehearsal of r...

Brain activation during motor imagery has been the subject of a large number of studies in healthy subjects, leading to divergent interpretations with respect to the role of descending pathways and kinesthetic feedback on the mental rehearsal of movements. We investigated patients with complete spinal cord injury (SCI) to find out how the complete disruption of motor efferents and sensory affer...

Transcranial magnetic stimulat ion (TMS) over the motor cortex during motor imagery results in increased amplitudes of motor evoked potentials (MEPs) in muscles specific to the imagined movement. Functional MRI studies demonstrate that motor imagery involves a widespread neural network including prefrontal and parietal areas. The purpose of this pilot TMS study was to explore whether the left p...

Individuals with hemiplegia have difficulty planning movements, which may stem from deficits in motor imagery ability. We explored motor imagery ability in three groups of 21 children, aged 8-12 years: children with hemiplegia; children with developmental coordination disorder (DCD); and a comparison group. They completed two tasks requiring laterality judgments of body parts--hand and whole-bo...

Motor imagery, or the mental rehearsal of actions in the absence of physical movement, is an increasingly popular construct in fields such as neuroscience, cognitive psychology and sport psychology. Unfortunately, few models of motor imagery have been postulated to date. Nevertheless, based on the hypothesis of functional equivalence between imagery, perception and motor execution, Holmes and C...