The Effect of Motor Imagery Practice on an Aiming Task with Attentional Focus Cues

Abstract

When one directs their attention to an intended effect (external focus of attention, EFOA), motor performance is generally better than when one directs their attention to their own body movements (internal focus of attention, IFOA). However, the effect of attentional focus is unclear when a skill is practiced through motor imagery (MI) in the absence of physical trials. Participants (N = 30, M = 22.33 yrs, SD = 2.69) in the present study completed three physical trials of a reciprocal aiming task before and (24-h) after MI practice. During MI practice, the EFOA (n = 15) and IFOA (n = 15) groups mentally practiced the task with no physical practice with EFOA-MI or IFOA-MI, respectively, for three consecutive days. Our results showed that both groups significantly improved in accuracy (F_1,28 = 6.49, p = .017), supporting the benefit of MI in motor skill acquisition. However, a significant effect of attentional focus was not observed (F_1.,28 = 0.445, p = 0.51). We discussed two potential explanations: EFOA/IFOA requires physical trials to affect performance, or individuals must use both EFOA and IFOA in the process of creating imagery of the environment and movements, which may obscure the effect of EFOA and IFOA.

Keywords:

• focus of attention
• motor performance
• mental practice
• attentional focus
• motor learning
• motor behavior

Authors Contribution

Masahiro Yamada: Writing (original, editing, review), methodology, conceptualization, data collection, software, data curation, data analysis, and visualization. Amanda Barclift: Writing (editing) and data collection. Louisa Raisbeck: Writing (editing), methodology, conceptualization, and project supervision.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data Availability Statement

The dataset is available at https://osf.io/bu52f (DOI 10.17605/OSF.IO/BU52F).

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.