title: Effects of model orientation on the visuomotor imitation of arm movements: the role of mental rotation.
abstract: An experiment was conducted to examine whether visual perspective has an effect on visuomotor imitation. The experiment presented varied visual perspectives in terms of spatial disparity between a model and an observer (model-observer-disparity) on six levels. Female participants were asked to imitate different arm movements presented in videos by animated models. These arm movements were elbow-extension-flexion movements with one (lower complexity) or three (higher complexity) reversals of movement direction. The results showed that model-observer-disparity affects spatial trajectories and velocities in the performance of motor imitations. The movements' complexity did not affect orientation dependence. Due to the non-linearity of the data, it is questionable if orientation dependence can be at least partially explained by mental rotation processes or differential ideomotor effects. According to these results, high model-observer-disparity should be avoided when using visual instructions in visuomotor imitation.
authors.affiliation: Movement Science, Department of Sports and Health, Faculty of Science, University of Paderborn, Germany. daniel.krause@upb.de
authors.forename: Daniel
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Krause
authors.forename: Sven
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Kobow
mesh_terms: D000054:Acceleration; D001132:Arm; D001364:Awareness; D001696:Biomechanical Phenomena; D003210:Concept Formation; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007100:Imitative Behavior; D007699:Kinesthesis; D009068:Movement; D009119:Muscle Contraction; D009949:Orientation; D011340:Problem Solving; D011597:Psychomotor Performance; D014741:Video Recording; D014796:Visual Perception; D055815:Young Adult