Sport And Exercise Psychology: A Critical Introduction

physically. The time taken to complete these mental races was then compared with actual
race times, As expected, there was a significant positive correlation between mental and
physical race times (r=0.78, p<.05). Finally, a content analysis of the canoeists’ accounts
of their kinaesthetic imagery experiences revealed the importance which these performers
attached to sensations of force and effort

Clearly, imagery representations have three important characteristics. First, they are
multi-sensory constructs which enable us to bring to mind experiences of absent objects,
events and/or experiences. Second, they are believed to be functionally equivalent to
percepts in the sense that they share a great deal of the same brain machinery or neural
substrates with perception. Finally, mental images vary in their vividness and
controllability—two dimensions which facilitate their measurement (see the third part of
this chapter). Having explained the nature and types of imagery, let us now consider the
topic of mental practice (MP).

Mental practice

As I explained earlier, MP refers to a systematic form of covert rehearsal in which people
imagine themselves performing an action without engaging in the actual physical
movements involved (Driskell, Copper and Moran, 1994). Because it relies on simulated
movements (see Decety and Ingvar, 1990), MP is sometimes known as “visuo-motor
behavioural rehearsal” (VMBR; Suinn, 1994). It has also been called: “symbolic
rehearsal”; “imaginary practice”; “implicit practice”; “mental rehearsal”; “covert
rehearsal”; “mental training”; and “cognitive practice” (see Murphy and Jowdy, 1992) as
well as “motor imagery” (Decety and Michel, 1989).
Psychological interest in mental practice is as old as the discipline of psychology
itself. For example, W. James (1890) suggested rather counter-intuitively that by
anticipating experiences imaginatively, people actually learn to skate in the summer and
to swim in the winter! Interestingly, the 1890s witnessed various expressions of an idea
called the “ideo-motor principle” which suggested that all thoughts have muscular
concomitants. For example, in 1899 Beaunis (cited in Washburn, 1916) proposed that “it
is well known that the idea of a movement suffices to produce the movement or make it
tend to be produced” (p. 138). Similarly, Carpenter (1894) claimed that low-level neural
impulses are produced during imagined movement. Furthermore, he argued that these
impulses are similar in nature, but lower in amplitude, to those emitted during actual
movement. I shall return to this ideo-motor hypothesis later in the chapter when
evaluating theories of mental practice.
Although research on MP was vibrant in the wake of Galton’s (1883) research on
imagery vividness, it declined in popularity shortly afterwards as a result of the
Behaviourist manifesto (Watson, 1913) which attacked “mentalistic” constructs such as
imagery because they were too subjective to be amenable to empirical investigation.
Fortunately, a resurgence of research on mental practice occurred in the 1930s with the
work of Jacobson (1932), Perry (1939) and Sackett (1934). These studies continued in a
rather sporadic, atheoretical manner until the 1960s, when the first comprehensive
reviews of mental practice were published by Richardson (1967a, 1967b). Unfortunately,

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