Discussion
Fournier
SECONDARY, FOURNIER
The present study aimed to gain insight into complex action imagery processes, such as backward-walking, as they can be useful in developing training protocols based on MI. Specifically, our main hypothesis concerns the influence of physical activity and sport performance on MI abilities. We tested a sample of young women, divided into Active and Sedentary, in a mental chronometric task in which they had first to imagine and then execute a simple (forward-walking) and a complex (backward-walking) motor behavior. Isochrony Efficiency index (IE), calculated as the difference between imagination and execution times in both conditions (forward and backward), was used.Our findings showed that active individuals, who are experienced in sports, performed better in backward-walking imagination than Sedentary. Active individuals showed a superior IE index (i.e., a smaller difference between imagination and execution times) (Table These results can be discussed in relation to the physical and mental features of both tasks (forward and backward), considering that task difficulty influences temporal accuracy (Calmels & Fournier, The better performance of active individuals in comparison to Sedentary in the backward imagination task can be explained by the fact that physically more active people (like our Active group) physically train different fine motor skills more often, so they have a better, more detailed, and more varied representation of different fine motor skills. The present finding is in line with previous results that evidenced how motor experience is an essential factor for the accuracy of imagery timing (Calmels & Fournier, Our secondary hypothesis regarded the ability to vividly imagine motor behaviors within various perspectives (visual internal, visual external, and kinesthetic) in sedentary and active individuals and how the use of different perspectives was influenced by physical activity and sport experience. We administered the Vividness of Movement Imagery Questionnaire (VMIQ-2) to active and sedentary participants and used VMIQ-2 scales as predictors for MIE in a generalized linear model (GLM).GLM outputs (Table These findings showed that the ability to imagine is indeed influenced by the perspective used. Nevertheless, this seems to apply mostly to sedentary individuals rather than active ones. The association between EVI perspective and poor imagery abilities in FW may be explained by the fact that FW is a simple motor pattern. Therefore, reproducing it from the perspective typically used for learning new movements was inefficient (Montuori et al., The use of MI in sport psychology remains of particular interest, despite all methodological issues discussed so far. MI could be essential for creating training protocols suitable for beginners or more experienced athletes (Fusco et al., 