The modulation of motor control by imitating non-biological motions: a study about motor resonance.
Yu Miyawaki, Taisei Yamamoto
PMID 29410589WHAT IT FOUND
Healthy young adults who imitated a moving triangle showed less movement variability afterward than before.
The group that only watched did not show this reduction. This was a lab study, not a patient treatment.
Key findings
01After imitating the moving triangle, the imitation group had smaller movement variability at post-test than at pre-test (185.8 mm 2 vs 109.1 mm 2; p=0.018).
02The non-imitation group had larger movement variability at post-test than at mean-baseline (152.7 mm 2 vs 81.5 mm 2; p=0.011).
03The change in movement variability across phases differed between the imitation and non-imitation groups (F=4.11, p=0.023).
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they found
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What it does not show
Only healthy undergraduate students were tested, so the result may not apply to patients with movement disorders. The analysis excluded two participants who did not show a pre-test interference effect and one outlier, leaving 12 participants in each analysed group. The outcome was fingertip trajectory variance in a lab task, not a patient function or therapy outcome. The study did not test imitation of a therapist’s movements or clinical rehabilitation. The authors did not quantify how different the triangle’s movement properties were from human movement.
Declared interests
The authors declare no competing interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that therapists should have patients imitate movements to improve motor control. This study tested healthy students imitating a moving triangle, not patients or therapy, and the effect was a lab measure of movement variability.