scholarly journals The Use of Kinetic Imagery by Children and Adults

1984 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-20
Author(s):  
Linda J. Anooshian ◽  
Katryn Wilson ◽  
Alice A. D'Acosta
Keyword(s):  
Mental Imagery ◽  
Age Differences ◽  
Mental Representation ◽  
Response Times ◽  
Developmental Changes ◽  
Horizontal Movement ◽  
Performance Levels ◽  
Task Administration ◽  
Better Than

In this study, we examined developmental improvement in kinetic imagery skills as related to differences in the utilizability vs. evocability of those skills. Analyses were conducted on performance levels and response times for task trials in which participants were required to determine which of 3 larger blocks could be "made" by combining (through imagery) 2 smaller blocks. Adults performed better than did 9- or 11-year-olds, especially for trials that required mental representation of rotation as well as horizontal movement. Examination of the effects of 2 conditions of task administration indicated no developmental changes in the adjustment of methods of task solution to specific instructions. However, analyses of response times suggested that age differences in performance levels could be attributed to differences in the degree to which possibilities of ways in which blocks could be combined through mental imagery were exhaustively examined.

scholarly journals Age differences in the use of implicit visual cues in a response time task

2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 86-93 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jose Angelo Barela ◽  
Anselmo A Rocha ◽  
Andrew R Novak ◽  
Job Fransen ◽  
Gabriella A Figueiredo
Keyword(s):  
Response Time ◽  
Age Differences ◽  
Visual Cues ◽  
Response Times ◽  
Age Groups ◽  
Developmental Changes ◽  
Time Intervals ◽  
Stimulus Response ◽  
Time Task ◽  
Adolescents And Adults

Background: Many activities require a complex interrelationship between a performer and stimuli available in the environment without explicit perception, but many aspects regarding developmental changes in the use of implicit cues remain unknown. Aim: To investigate the use of implicit visual precueing presented at different time intervals in children, adolescents, and adults. Method: Seventy-two people, male and female, constituted four age groups: 8-, 10- and 12-year-olds and adults. Participants performed 32 trials, four-choice-time task across four conditions: no precue and a 43 ms centralized dot appearing in the stimulus circle at 43, 86 or 129 ms prior the stimulus. Response times were obtained for each trial and pooled into each condition. Results: Response times for 8-year-olds were longer than for 12-year-olds and adults and for 10-year-olds were longer than for adults. Response times were longer in the no precue condition compared to when precues were presented at 86 and 129 ms before the stimulus. Response times were longer when precue was presented at 43 ms compared presented at 129 ms before the stimulus. Interpretation: Implicit precues reduce response time in children, adolescents and adults, but young children benefit less from implicit precues than adolescents and adults.

scholarly journals Skill and strategic control

Synthese ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ellen Fridland
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
Mental Imagery ◽  
Sports Psychology ◽  
Mental Practice ◽  
Strategic Control ◽  
Cognitive Representations ◽  
Personal Level ◽  
The Right ◽  
Better Than

AbstractThis paper provides an account of the strategic control involved in skilled action. When I discuss strategic control, I have in mind the practical goals, plans, and strategies that skilled agents use in order to specify, structure, and organize their skilled actions, which they have learned through practice. The idea is that skilled agents are better than novices not only at implementing the intentions that they have but also at forming the right intentions. More specifically, skilled agents are able formulate and modify, adjust and adapt their practical intentions in ways that are appropriate, effective, and flexible given their overall goals. Further, to specify the kind of action plans that are involved in strategic control, I’ll rely on empirical evidence concerning mental practice and mental imagery from sports psychology as well as evidence highlighting the systematic differences in the cognitive representations of skills between experts and non-experts. I’ll claim that, together, this evidence suggests that the intentions that structure skilled actions are practical and not theoretical, that is, that they are perceptual and motor and not abstract, amodal, or linguistic. Importantly, despite their grounded nature, these plans are still personal-level, deliberate, rational states. That is, the practical intentions used to specify and structure skilled actions are best conceived of as higher-order, motor-modal structures, which can be manipulated and used by the agent for the purpose of reasoning, deliberation, decision-making and, of course, the actual online structuring and organizing of action.

scholarly journals Age Differences in Central (Semantic) and Peripheral Processing: The Importance of Considering Both Response Times and Errors

2004 ◽  
Vol 59 (5) ◽  
pp. P210-P219 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. A. Allen ◽  
M. D. Murphy ◽  
M. Kaufman ◽  
K. E. Groth ◽  
A. Begovic
Keyword(s):  
Age Differences ◽  
Response Times ◽  
Peripheral Processing

Efficacy of Mental Imagery in Enhancing Mental Rehearsal of Motor Skills

1982 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-51 ◽  
Author(s):  
E. Dean Ryan ◽  
Jeff Simons
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Style ◽  
Mental Imagery ◽  
Motor Skills ◽  
Motor Performance ◽  
Visual Images ◽  
Single Session ◽  
Physical Practice ◽  
Mental Rehearsal ◽  
Learning Improvement ◽  
Better Than

To investigate the mental imagery aspect of mental rehearsal, 80 male traffic officers from the California Highway Patrol learned a novel balancing task during a single session. Based on a pretest questionnaire, subjects were categorized as imagers, nonimagers, or occasional imagers and assigned to one of six groups accordingly: imagers asked to use imagery in mental rehearsal, imagers asked to try not to use imagery, nonimagers asked not to use imagery, nonimagers asked to try to use imagery, physical practice, or no practice. It was hypothesized that a person's preferred cognitive style would prove most effective for use in mental rehearsal and that using another style would cause a decrement in learning. Improvement scores indicated no differences between subjects who initially reported typically using imagery and those reported typically not using it, but groups asked to use imagery in mental rehearsal were superior to those asked not to (p<.001). Overall, physical practice was better than the grouped mental rehearsal conditions, and both were better than no practice. Subjects reporting strong visual imagery were superior to those with weak visual images (p<.03), and those reporting strong kinesthetic imagery were superior to those with weak kinesthetic images (p<.03). Regardless of one's typical cognitive style, the use of vivid imagery appears quite important for enhancement of motor performance through mental rehearsal.

scholarly journals A motor imagery during blind action is guided by the same foci of attention as actual performance in a sample comprising females

2014 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 11-16
Author(s):  
Bassem Khalaf
Keyword(s):  
Mental Imagery ◽  
Focus Of Attention ◽  
Direct Role ◽  
Actual Performance ◽  
External Focus ◽  
Deviation Measure ◽  
Straight Line ◽  
Internal Focus ◽  
Perceptual Representations ◽  
Better Than

There is strong evidence that focussing on the goal of an action improves performance relative to focussing on the concrete motor behaviours. The current study tests whether blind action guided by imagery relies on the same foci of attention. Thirty female participants took part in an experiment. In each condition there were 20 trials, they were asked to close their eyes and draw a straight line between two landmarks on a graphics tablet. We instructed them, in three conditions, to focus on (1) mental imagery of the goal landmark (external focus of attention), (2) drawing a straight line with the fingers (internal focus), or (3) without a specific focus of attention (control). We tested to what extent these attention instructions affected drawing performance, in terms of both deviations of the participants’ lines from an ideal straight line, and the time it took to complete the line. The study revealed that the manipulation specifically affected the deviation measure and that an external focus of attention was better than an internal focus and the control condition. These findings reveal that that mental imagery during blind action relies on same processes as actual performance. These data give perceptual representations of a direct role in motor control. They will be related to current theories of action control (constrained action hypothesis, ideomotor theories, and dual task accounts).

scholarly journals Mouse Age Matters: How Age Affects the Murine Plasma Metabolome

Metabolites ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (11) ◽  
pp. 472
Author(s):  
Patrick Pann ◽  
Martin Hrabě de Angelis ◽  
Cornelia Prehn ◽  
Jerzy Adamski
Keyword(s):  
Age Differences ◽  
Early Adulthood ◽  
High Variability ◽  
Developmental Changes ◽  
Mouse Strains ◽  
Targeted Metabolomics ◽  
Age Related ◽  
Plasma Metabolome ◽  
Metabolite Profiles ◽  
Age Range

A large part of metabolomics research relies on experiments involving mouse models, which are usually 6 to 20 weeks of age. However, in this age range mice undergo dramatic developmental changes. Even small age differences may lead to different metabolomes, which in turn could increase inter-sample variability and impair the reproducibility and comparability of metabolomics results. In order to learn more about the variability of the murine plasma metabolome, we analyzed male and female C57BL/6J, C57BL/6NTac, 129S1/SvImJ, and C3HeB/FeJ mice at 6, 10, 14, and 20 weeks of age, using targeted metabolomics (BIOCRATES AbsoluteIDQ™ p150 Kit). Our analysis revealed high variability of the murine plasma metabolome during adolescence and early adulthood. A general age range with minimal variability, and thus a stable metabolome, could not be identified. Age-related metabolomic changes as well as the metabolite profiles at specific ages differed markedly between mouse strains. This observation illustrates the fact that the developmental timing in mice is strain specific. We therefore stress the importance of deliberate strain choice, as well as consistency and precise documentation of animal age, in metabolomics studies.

scholarly journals Phonetic Training Significantly Mitigates the Stress ‘Deafness’ of French Speakers

2015 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 94 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angela C. Carpenter
Keyword(s):  
Response Times ◽  
Phonological Representation ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Paper Briefly ◽  
Lower Response ◽  
Word Stress ◽  
Stress Task ◽  
French And English ◽  
French Group ◽  
Better Than

<p>Stress ‘deafness’ refers to the inconsistent perception and/or processing of phonological stress by speakers of fixed stress languages such as French. This paper briefly reports on the results of a study in which French and English participants performed an ABX word stress task, similar to Dupoux et al.’s (1997) Experiment 1. One group of French and a group of English speakers received phonetic training designed to improve perception while two other groups of French and English speakers received no training. The training was an adaptation of the perceptual fading technique, which exposes listeners to stressed syllables that exaggerate the durational correlate of stress, then gradually reduces the durations of subsequent stressed syllables to increase participants’ overall ability to accurately perceive stressed syllables. The trained French group performed significantly better than the untrained group with fewer errors and lower response times. As expected there was no difference in accuracy between the trained and untrained English groups. We argue that by exaggerating the duration cue for stress, the phonetic training led to increased overall perception, perhaps even beginning to build an abstract phonological representation of stress that was then carried into the ABX task. Although trained on artificially manipulated stimuli, participants were able to perform well on naturally-produced novel stimuli.</p>

Individual Differences in Skilled Performance following Imagery of Bilateral Skill

1982 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
pp. 771-780 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul E. Turner ◽  
Robert M. Kohl ◽  
Larry W. Morris
Keyword(s):  
Individual Differences ◽  
Mental Imagery ◽  
Control Group ◽  
Dominant Hand ◽  
Eysenck Personality Inventory ◽  
Skilled Performance ◽  
Pursuit Tracking ◽  
Practice Trials ◽  
Post Hoc ◽  
Better Than

The present study examined individual differences related to imagery about bilateral skill. 100 males were pretested on the Betts and Gordon scales for competency of imagery and the Eysenck Personality Inventory (to assess introversion-extraversion), and randomly assigned to an experimental or control group. Experimental subjects were given 15 30-sec. sessions performing rotary pursuit, 5 min. rest, and 15 30-sec. trials with the non-dominant hand. Controls received identical treatment but recited the multiplication table instead of generating mental imagery. As expected, skill imagery facilitated bilateral transfer of pursuit tracking. Limited support for competency in generating imagery as a prerequisite for effective imagery of one skill was given only to the extent that subjects who could control imagery, practiced mental imagery, and were given 10 to 15 physical practice trials, performed better than those with less control. Contrary to prediction, there was no evidence of personality effects either in correlations of personality scores with performance or in a post hoc analysis of variance in which subjects were assigned to treatment versus control and extravert versus introvert groups.

Actionality and mental imagery in children's comprehension of declaratives

1995 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 189-209 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean-Pierre Thibaut ◽  
Jean A. Rondal ◽  
Anne-Marie KÄens
Keyword(s):  
Mental Imagery ◽  
Present Experiment ◽  
Argument Structure ◽  
Sentence Comprehension ◽  
Mental Image ◽  
Experimental Context ◽  
French Speaking ◽  
Predicate Argument Structure ◽  
The Voice ◽  
Better Than

ABSTRACTPrevious work bas demonstrated that children understand sentences with actional verbs better than nonactional verbs. This ACTIONALITY EFFECT bas been reportee to be restricted to passives and to be independent of experimental context. The present experiment was conducted with 48 French-speaking children aged 5;0–7;11. The actionality effect was studied by systematically varying the voice of the test sentences and the voice of the interpretive requests. Pictures corresponding or not to the predicate—argument structure of the sentences were presented to the subjects, who were independently classified as visualizers or nonvisualizers, in order to investigate the relation between sentence actionality and mental imagery. The interaction between actionality, voice of sentence, and interpretive request revealed that the actionality effect depends on the type of task used in order to assess comprehension, and that it can be reversed in some conditions. Our results also suggest that the actionality effect is linked to mental imagery. Visualizers demonstrated better comprehension of actional sentences than nonvisualizers, whereas the reverse was true for nonactional sentences. Mental image may serve as a support for the computations involved in sentence comprehension.

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