Motor Imagery and Sport Psychology

Question 1

Distributed Practice

Answer 1

Practice interspersed with significant rest periods

Question 2

Massed Practice

Answer 2

Practice with little rest between trials

Question 3

What type of practice is better, distributed or mass?

Answer 3

Distributed results in better performance at the end of a learning session

Question 4

Yerkes-Dodson Law

Answer 4

There is an inverted U shape of the effect of emotional arousal on performance

Question 5

Are movements ever the same?

Answer 5

No they are always unique just due to the degrees of freedom we have with so many muscles and muscle fibres etc

Question 6

Constant error vs variable error

Answer 6

Like if you threw darts, if you got a lot of them in the same area but far from the bullseye you would have a large constant error and small variable error

Question 7

What is an example of using errors to practice precise motor skills?

Answer 7

Babies babbling and making random noises, constantly making errors allows them to get better at it

Question 8

With someone throwing or using darts what physical control do they have when throwing the dart?

Answer 8

The angle and the speed at which they throw the dart

Question 9

What relationship does the angle of release and speed of release have?

Answer 9

They form a U shape of the best interaction to get the best results. A certain speed x a certain angle will determine how many pins are knocked over or where the darts goes

Question 10

What are the two main types of feedback?

Answer 10

Task-Intrinsic Feedback and Augmented Feedback

Question 11

Task-Intrinsic Feedback

Answer 11

Feedback about the task itself such as visual, auditory, tactile or proprioceptive

Question 12

Augmented Feedback

Answer 12

Knowledge of the the results and Knowledge of the performance

Question 13

Specificity of learning hypothesis

Answer 13

If motor learning has taken place under task-relevant augmented feedback then withdrawing this feedback results in a decrement in the results

Question 14

Fits and Posner 1967 Learning Stages

Answer 14

Cognitive Verbal Stage –> Learning the rules and describing what you are doing verbally. Attention demanding and little room for improving movements

Associative Stage –> Practicing a task. Skill refinement, discovering and applying if-then rules

Autonomous Stage –> Hardly any attention is required, anticipation of others is implicit, available for other aspects, task switching is eay

Question 15

Motor Learning can be separated into two loops

Answer 15

Open loop motor control is the execution of preprogrammed movements. Computer Like! It’s like throwing a dart, once you release it, it is up to physics. Sports like billiards that rely on ballistic movements. It is a one way flow of data with no feedback. Like a one way street

Closed Loop –> Self adjusting loop system. There is some kind of position information that is fed back to the motion controller of a system that is used in the positioning process. (A snowboarder would feel through kinesthesis and proprioception that they were losing balance. They will know from their long term memory that they need to act on the issue and make quick adjustments in order to retain balance. The successful outcome will be stored in the long term memoru

Question 16

Adam’s Theory has two elements

Answer 16

Perceptual Trace is a reference model acquired through practice
Memory Trace is responsible for initiating the movement

Question 17

Schmidt’s Theory was based on the view that

Answer 17

Actions are not stored rather we refer to abstract relationships or rules about movement. Every time a movement is conducted 4 pieces of information are gathered
–> Starting point
–> How fast or high is the motor action
–> Result of the action, a success or failure
–> Sensory consequences, how it felt

Question 18

Skill to skill

Answer 18

When you develop a skill in one sport that has an influence on a skill in another sport

Question 19

Proactive skill to skill

Answer 19

When the influence is on a new skill being developed

Question 20

Retroactive skill to skill

Answer 20

When the influence is on a previously learned skill

Question 21

Where is explicit learning based?

Answer 21

Prefrontal areas with working memory and then the hippocampus

Question 22

Where is implicit learning based?

Answer 22

More in the basal ganglia, SMA, Cerebellum, and Brainstem

Question 23

Can subcortical control be used in movement generation?

Answer 23

In reflexes or even if you remove the brain of a cat it is able to walk on a threadmill

Question 24

Mental Imagery

Answer 24

All the quasi-sensory and perceptual experiences of which we are self consciously aware and which exist for us in the absence of the stimulus conditions

Question 25

Mental Imagery

Answer 25

People see an imaginal performance routine or feel the swing of the bat
–> It is not dreaming as we are aware of imagining things
–> There are no sensory antecedents

Question 26

Is mental practice an effective skill to do?

Answer 26

Mental Practice is better than No practice
–> Mental Practice along with Physical Practice is more effective than either alone!!!!

Question 27

Does psyching up or positive self-talk help?

Answer 27

Very hard to control as an experimenter to control how much someone does psych themselves up but it can help

Question 28

What are some problems with the mental practice model

Answer 28

It is difficult to define, ‘practicing a tennis serve’.
–> Are you thinking about serving or talking yourself through the steps? Are you imagining an expert hitting the ball or something else?

Question 29

Another issue with the model?

Answer 29

Motor imagery is explicitly processing of motor skills but if you are an expert you are relying on implicit processing
–> Mental imagery tend to activate prefrontal regions but they tend to deactivate prefrontal regions
–> May be useful for slow ball sports such as golf or archery where the motionless pre-shot routine is the decisive phase

Question 30

What happens when we observe a hand movement?

Answer 30

Activation was mainly in the visual areas
–> Also in subcortical areas involved in motor behavior such as the basal ganglia and cerebellum
–> During motor imagery, cortical and subcortical areas related to motor preparation and programming were strongly activated
–> This supports the notion that motor learning during observations of movements and mental practice involves rehearsal of neural pathways related to cognitive stages of motor control

Question 31

When mentally rotating right hands which orientation is slower?

Answer 31

In clockwise orientation requires more movements
–> The opposite is true for left hands
–> The right hemisphere was activated more for left hand movements and vice versa

Question 32

In terms of movement, what is the cerebellum used for?

Answer 32

The nitty gritty details such as trajectory, force and timing
–> it also is involved in sensorimotor integration. Like the split second, in flight adjustments that must inevitably be made as the motor plan unfolds in real time.
–> The cerebellum can do this as it receives direct feedback from several sensory modalities

Question 33

Calculatoions such as _______ do not occur during imagery

Answer 33

Error detection and conflict monitoring during motuon that modify the original motion from the original

Question 34

The cerebellum has more neurons that any other structure in the brain including the _____

Answer 34

Entire cerebral cortex as they do the brunt of the fine motor coordination

Question 35

During rigorous exercise, the brain has massive neural activation yet

Answer 35

There is no increased blood flow to the brain