Introduction
Plakoutsis, injuries, Motor behaviors, ’
Evidence has shown that imagining a complex action, like backward-walking, helps improve the execution of the gesture. Despite this, studies in sport psychology have provided heterogeneous results on the use of motor imagery (MI) to improve performance. We aimed to fill this gap by analyzing how sport experience influences backward-walking MI processes in a sample of young women (Open access funding provided by Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II within the CRUI-CARE Agreement.Motor imagery (MI) describes the mental execution of a movement, motor act, or action without consciously moving or activating muscles (Decety, MI's features enable it to be of value in accelerating procedural learning and recovering motor skills after injuries (Plakoutsis et al., MI can be divided into two categories based on the perspective used during imagination: Athletes’ expertise should also be considered when evaluating the MI process. It has been proven that professional athletes have better imaginative abilities compared to novices since they regularly use MI to improve their gestures (Diotaiuti et al., Lastly, the complexity of the gesture to be imagined represents another crucial issue. Motor behaviors consist of gestures that can be increasingly complex, such as movements, motor acts, and actions (Mandolesi et al., The potential benefits of backward MI training and the growing research on this topic, driven, however, by different experimental protocols and methods as well as conflicting findings (Grealy & Shearer, To this aim, 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 perform the same motor behavior: forward and backward-walking. Isochrony Efficiency (IE) index was calculated after the task by measuring the difference between imagination and execution times in both conditions (forward and backward).Moreover, we tested how the ability to vividly imagine a motor behavior within various perspectives (visual internal, visual external, and kinesthetic) differently affected IE for active and sedentary individuals. Given the lack of heterogeneous data on the predominant type of perspective used in MI (Morone et al., 