Imaging the imagination: The trouble with motor imagery

Sports and exercise psychology finds itself in a most unfortunate situation these days. While all other branches of the psychological sciences help themselves freely to the glitzy new toys of modern neuroscience—MRI and PET, mostly—exploring the neural underpinnings of whatever cognitive function they are interested in exploring, the sport sciences are left out of the fun for the simple reason that these imaging instruments preclude motion—the very thing then that is the subject of interest to them. There are several legitimate ways around this problem but the one that seems to be most popular is, I think, not—legitimate, that is. The basic idea, unduly sharpened here, is the following. Neuroimaging studies have shown that imagined and actual motion share the same neural substrates or, alternatively, imagining an action corresponds to a subliminal activation of the same brain areas required for its execution. It follows from this, the arguments runs, that motor imagery can be used as a proxy for real motor performance, et voilà, the sports sciences can go wild with all the snazzy brain imaging tools after all—just like everyone else. This notion is, I believe, misbegotten, a house of cards that threatens to cast a long shadow over the field. The present article, then, is, to be frank, intended to put a machete to this kind of thinking. It does this by exposing this conclusion to be based on an unholy marriage of selective data reporting and gross overgeneralization. The result is a wild goose chase fueled by wishful thinking.