title: Mental representation and motor imagery training.
abstract: Research in sports, dance and rehabilitation has shown that basic action concepts (BACs) are fundamental building blocks of mental action representations. BACs are based on chunked body postures related to common functions for realizing action goals. In this paper, we outline issues in research methodology and an experimental method, the structural dimensional analysis of mental representation (SDA-M), to assess action-relevant representational structures that reflect the organization of BACs. The SDA-M reveals a strong relationship between cognitive representation and performance if complex actions are performed. We show how the SDA-M can improve motor imagery training and how it contributes to our understanding of coaching processes. The SDA-M capitalizes on the objective measurement of individual mental movement representations before training and the integration of these results into the motor imagery training. Such motor imagery training based on mental representations (MTMR) has been applied successfully in professional sports such as golf, volleyball, gymnastics, windsurfing, and recently in the rehabilitation of patients who have suffered a stroke.
authors.affiliation: Neurocognition and Action-Biomechanics Research Group, Center of Excellence "Cognitive Interaction Technology", Research Institute for Cognition and Robotics, Bielefeld University Bielefeld, Germany.
authors.forename: Thomas
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Schack
authors.affiliation: Neurocognition and Action-Biomechanics Research Group, Center of Excellence "Cognitive Interaction Technology", Research Institute for Cognition and Robotics, Bielefeld University Bielefeld, Germany.
authors.forename: Kai
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Essig
authors.affiliation: Neurocognition and Action-Biomechanics Research Group, Center of Excellence "Cognitive Interaction Technology", Research Institute for Cognition and Robotics, Bielefeld University Bielefeld, Germany.
authors.forename: Cornelia
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Frank
authors.affiliation: Neurocognition and Action-Biomechanics Research Group, Center of Excellence "Cognitive Interaction Technology", Research Institute for Cognition and Robotics, Bielefeld University Bielefeld, Germany.
authors.forename: Dirk
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Koester
keywords: basic action concepts; mental imagery; mental representation; mental simulation; motor imagery