Motor imagery and music: A function of arousal?

The study of imagery has been a central pillar in the Sports Psychology field, since athletes have reported the use of imagery techniques in order to mentally practice body movements and, therefore, improve the actual physical performance. Similarly, music plays a quintessential role in many sports as its influence on athletes’ motivation, concentration, confidence and anxiety levels before and during the sporting practice has been widely reported and studied. The application of imagery and music combined has been reported to yield improvement in sporting performance. As a possible explanation, certain types of music have been considered as an element that decreases arousal levels in subjects, promoting a more effective use of imagery prior to performance. However, it has also been reported that subjects had better performance at tasks that assessed mental imagery processes after arousal increase after subjects’ exposure to arousing music. Thus, this study has investigated whether two distinct musical stimuli (simple and complex music) affected arousal levels in participants, and consequently the performance in a mental imagery of body parts (henceforth: motor imagery) cognitive task, namely mental-rotation of bodily-related pictures. 30 Sports Science students completed this mental rotation of body pictures task after exposure to three different stimuli (silence, complex music and simple music). Although results showed arousal levels decrease after subjects were exposed to both complex music and silence, this decrease did not yield any effect on performance, casting doubt on the hypothesis that arousal decrease facilitates motor imagery processes.