Abstract
A vast body of research suggests that the primary motor cortex is involved in motor imagery. This raises the issue of inhibition: how is it possible for motor imagery not to lead to motor execution? Bach et al. (Psychol Res Psychol Forschung. 10.1007/s00426-022-01773-w, 2022, this issue) suggest that the motor execution threshold may be “upregulated” during motor imagery to prevent execution. Alternatively, it has been proposed that, in parallel to excitatory mechanisms, inhibitory mechanisms may be actively suppressing motor output during motor imagery. These theories are verbal in nature, with well-known limitations. Here, we describe a toy-model of the inhibitory mechanisms thought to be at play during motor imagery to start disentangling predictions from competing hypotheses.
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An interactive Shiny application allowing to visualise the predictions of the model is available at: https://barelysignificant.shinyapps.io/motor_imagery_inhibition_model/. An R package providing helper functions to fit the model and visualise its predictions is available at: https://github.com/lnalborczyk/momimi.
Notes
Here “trial” refers to a prototypical trial in the action-mode switching paradigm (Rieger et al., 2017), where participants have to perform motor imagery and indicate the onset (reaction time) and duration (movement time) of motor imagery via a response button.
This argument holds for any activation function that increases until a certain point in time and then decreases, and therefore is not specific to the lognormal activation function.
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Funding
We want to thank Camille Grasso for insightful comments at various stages of the present research. This work, carried out within the Institute of Convergence ILCB (ANR-16-CONV-0002), has benefited from support from the French government (France 2030), managed by the French National Agency for Research (ANR) and the Excellence Initiative of Aix-Marseille University (A*MIDEX). A CC-BY 4.0 public copyright license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) has been applied by the authors to the present document, in accordance with the grant’s open access conditions.
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Conceptualization: LN, ML, TG, MS, FXA; data curation: LN; formal analysis: LN, TG; funding acquisition: LN, ML, TG, MS, FXA; investigation: LN, ML, TG, MS, FXA; methodology: LN, ML, TG, MS, FXA; project administration: LN, ML, FXA; resources: LN, ML, TG, MS, FXA; software: LN, TG; supervision: ML, TG, MS, FXA; validation: ML, TG, MS, FXA; visualization: LN; writing—original draft: LN; writing—review and editing: LN, ML, TG, MS, FXA.
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Nalborczyk, L., Longcamp, M., Gajdos, T. et al. Towards formal models of inhibitory mechanisms involved in motor imagery: a commentary on Bach et al. (2022). Psychological Research (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-023-01915-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-023-01915-8