Dynamic locomotor imagery in athletes with severe visual impairments

Motor imagery is a mental process not accompanied by movement and widely studied in healthy subjects, related to hand movements in terms of timing. This study compared static and dynamic motor imagery analyzing temporal and spatial features in different locomotor conditions in three different groups of subjects: high-skilled athletes with visual impairments, a group of sighted unprofessional athletes and a control group of sighted subjects. We found that dynamic motor imagery resulted in timely closer to real performance than static motor imagery. The discrepancies between dynamic motor imagery and real condition, in fact, resulted limited to uncommon locomotion, such as lateral walking. Motor imagery resulted closer to real performance in terms of timing than in terms of step length, with the exception of athletes with visual impairments that, differently from the other groups, did not show any significant differences between the numbers of imagined and performed steps. It opens a new question about the relationship between temporal and spatial imagination of locomotion.