Most likely, efficient rehearsal involves a process of mental imagery in which subjects mentally simulate the motor and perceptual effects that would accompany the actual execution of such actions [11], [34].
They allow people to mentally simulate the behavior of a system.
Participants were requested to execute and to mentally simulate the motor tasks at a natural, self selected, speed and with their eyes open.
When people plan, they mentally simulate the linking of concrete responses to future situations, replacing spontaneous reactions for pre-planned actions.
Subjects were instructed to carefully observe the static objects and then to mentally simulate the action by keeping their eyes closed trying to "feel the same as during actual execution" (kinesthetic imagery).
Patients are asked to rate the level of difficulty for mentally simulating the movement, respectively for perceiving the reflected image in the mirror as their affected side (1 very easy to 10 very hard).
10 Indeed, the results showed that older adults were impaired in their ability to mentally simulate the rising from the floor sequence, at least through an image-sequencing task: they made significantly more sequencing errors than did their younger counterparts.
Motor imagery (MI) is one of the remarkable capacities of the mind enabling everyone to mentally simulate an action without engaging in actual physical execution [ 1].
They found that "readers mentally simulate each new situation encountered in a narrative".
One possibility is based on neurophysiologic evidence that the motor cortex can be activated not only during actual movements, but also when actions are merely observed or mentally simulated in the absence of motor output.
Finally, in Experiments 1 and 2, we found no evidence that skill in reasoning about spatial problems was related to the prior; individuals' ability to mentally simulate complex events (e.g., object rotation or view from a new perspective) did not appear to be related to their reporting structures projecting straight into a volume.
