Mental Practice to Facilitate Learning When Physical Practice is Unsafe: A Pilot Study

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this study was to examine the impact of a prescribed mental practice (MP) home program on participants’ ability to perform a newly learned floor-to-chair transfer and their ability to direct a caregiver in that transfer. Three community-dwelling older adults volunteered to participate in the intervention, which consisted of a traditional transfer training session followed by a 6-week MP home program involving repeated mental rehearsal of the transfer. Transfer performance was scored at baseline and three times over 12 weeks. Two of the three participants demonstrated improvement in transfer performance throughout the intervention program and retained the improvement through a 6-week nonintervention period. None of the participants demonstrated a consistent ability to direct a caregiver. This study indicates a positive influence of an MP home program on performance and retention of a floor-to-chair transfer over time. It did not support the use of MP to promote the ability to direct a caregiver.

KEYWORDS. :

• Mental practice
• mental rehearsal
• motor imagery