Mental Practice

• Mental Practice

  • The cognitive rehearsal of a skill without overt physical movement
  • Seeing and/or feeling oneself perform the skill
• Mental Practice - Why does it work?

  • Hypothesis 1: EMG activity in muscles that would be involved in the physical activity
  • Hypothesis 2: Similar brain regions are active in the imagining, observation and execution of a movement
  • Hypothesis 3: Helps cognitive processing of ‘what to do’ in early learning
• Learning principles for early stages:

  • Reduce cognitive load and effort
  • Demonstration
  • Direct attention
  • Meaningful visual / verbal cues
  • Focus on movement outcome
  • Bandwidth feedback at critical errors
  • Blocked practice for some populations
• Learning principles for later stages:

  • Variable practice ++
  • Self select feedback frequency
  • Reduce feedback frequency ++
  • Self identify & correct errors
  • Only give feedback when asked
  • Fixation (closed/discrete skills)
  • Diversification (open/continuous skills)
• Learning principles relevant to all stages:

  • Distributed practice
  • Variable (task specific) practice (ideal, not always possible)
  • Random practice (careful application)
  • Whole/Part with segmentation / simplification
  • Maximise practice opportunities
  • Reduced frequency augmented feedback (KR, KP – prescriptive)
  • Mental practice (may need training)
  • Meaningful practice