Imagery practice of motor skills without conscious awareness?: a commentary to Frank et al

TL;DR

The paper discusses how imagery practice affects motor learning and whether it can lead to improvements without conscious awareness.

Contribution

It raises the question of whether imagery practice can induce implicit adjustments without conscious awareness.

Findings

Imagery practice lacks prediction errors, which are crucial for learning during physical practice.

Explicit adjustments to motor transformations are possible with imagery practice.

Implicit adjustments during imagery practice remain uncertain.

Abstract

Modifications of imagined sensory consequences will not benefit overt performance when they cannot be transformed into motor outflow that produces them. With physical practice, the acquisition of internal models of motor transformations is largely based on prediction errors that are absent in imagery practice. What can imagery practice nevertheless contribute to transformation learning? Explicit, strategic adjustments to novel transformations should be possible. This appears less likely for implicit adjustments. Are there variants of imagery practice that can produce adjustments without conscious awareness of the transformation and/or the resultant movement changes?