Abstract
Motor imagery has been investigated in childhood and early adolescence, but not across adolescence stages; moreover, available evidence did not clarify whether the involvement of motor information in mental rotation of body parts becomes stronger or weaker during development. In the present study, we employed the hand laterality task to assess motor imagery in ninety-seven typically developing adolescents divided into three age groups (i.e., 11–12, 14–15, and 17–18 years); mental rotation of objects and letters were also assessed. As a specific marker of the motor involvement in mental rotation of body parts, we assessed the so-called biomechanical effect, that is, the advantage for judging hand pictures showing physically comfortable positions with respect to hand pictures showing physically impossible or awkward positions. Results demonstrated that the biomechanical effect did not significantly affect early adolescents’ performance, whereas it became significant in 14- to 15-year-old participants and even more stronger in 17- to 18-year-old participants; this pattern did not depend on an increase in processing speed to mentally rotate both corporeal and non-corporeal (objects and letters) stimuli. The present findings demonstrated that: (1) motor imagery undergoes a continuous and progressive refinement throughout adolescence, and (2) full exploitation of motor information to mentally transform corporeal stimuli can be attained in late adolescence only.
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Notes
To verify whether the lack of a significant biomechanical effect in early adolescents could be accounted for by increased variance in their performance blurring the effect, we tested for the homogeneity of variances between the different age groups. To this aim, we first calculated difference in RTs for mental rotation of 90° oriented right (awkward position) and left hand (comfortable orientation), and the difference in RTs for 270° oriented left (awkward position) and right hand (comfortable orientation; e.g., Conson et al. 2010). Then, these delta values underwent Levene’s test of homogeneity of variances between groups. Levene’s test showed significantly larger variance in middle versus early adolescents on the 270° delta value (F = 5.896, p = .018), whereas all remaining comparisons were not significant (early vs. middle adolescence: 90°, F = 1.407, p = .240; early vs. late adolescence: 90°, F = .305, p = .583; 270°, F = .342, p = .561; middle vs. late adolescence: 90°, F = 3.871, p = .053; 270°, F = 2.792, p = .100). These data ruled out the possibility that the lack of a significant biomechanical effect in early adolescents could be ascribed to increased variability of their performance with respect to the other two age groups.
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Conson, M., Mazzarella, E. & Trojano, L. Developmental changes of the biomechanical effect in motor imagery. Exp Brain Res 226, 441–449 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-013-3456-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-013-3456-x