Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-hc48f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T05:45:40.245Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Mental motor imagery and chronic pain: The foot laterality task

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 April 2010

H. BRANCH COSLETT ,
JARED MEDINA ,
DASHA KLIOT  and
ADAM BURKEY
H. BRANCH COSLETT*
Affiliation:
Department of Neurology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
JARED MEDINA
Affiliation:
Department of Neurology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
DASHA KLIOT
Affiliation:
Department of Neurology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
ADAM BURKEY
Affiliation:
Department of Anesthesiology, Division of Pain Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
*
*Correspondence and reprint requests to: H. Branch Coslett, MD, Department of Neurology, Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, 3400 Spruce St., Philadelphia, PA 19104. E-mail: hbc@mail.med.upenn.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Several lines of evidence suggest that mental motor imagery is subserved by the same cognitive operations and brain structures that underlie action. Additionally, motor imagery is informed by the anticipated sensory consequences of action, including pain. We reasoned that motor imagery could provide a useful measure of chronic leg or foot pain. Forty subjects with leg pain (19 bilateral, 11 right, and 10 left leg pain), 42 subjects with chronic pain not involving the legs, and 38 controls were shown 12 different line drawings of the right or left foot and asked to indicate which foot was depicted. Previous work suggests that subjects perform this task by mentally rotating their foot to match the visually presented stimulus. All groups of subjects were slower and less accurate with stimuli that required a greater degree of mental rotation of their foot. Subjects with leg pain were both slower and less accurate than normal and pain control subjects in responding to drawings of a painful extremity. Furthermore, subjects with leg pain exhibited a significantly greater decrement in performance for stimuli that required larger amplitude mental rotations. These data suggest that motor imagery may provide important insights into the nature of the pain experience. (JINS, 2010, 16, 603–612.)

Keywords

Body schemaMental rotationLeg painLower extremityPain assessmentImplicit actionChronic pain
Type
Research Articles
Information
Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society , Volume 16 , Issue 4 , July 2010 , pp. 603 - 612
Copyright
Copyright © The International Neuropsychological Society 2010

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Boly, M., Faymonville, M.E., Schnakers, C., Peigneux, P., Lambermont, B., Phillips, C., et al. (2008). Perception of pain in the minimally conscious state with PET activation: An observational study. Lancet Neurology, 7, 1013–1020.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Coslett, H.B. (1998). Evidence for a disturbance of the body schema in neglect. Brain Cognition, 37, 527–544.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Coslett, H.B., Saffran, E.M., & Schwoebel, J. (2002). Knowledge of the human body: A distinct semantic domain. Neurology, 59, 357–363.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Decety, J., & Jeannerod, M. (1995). Mentally simulated movements in virtual reality: Does Fitts’s law hold in motor imagery? Behavioral Brain Research, 72, 127–134.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Decety, J., Jeannerod, M., Durozard, D., & Baverel, G. (1993). Central activation of autonomic effectors during mental simulation of motor actions in man. Journal of Physiology, 461, 549–563.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Desmurget, M., & Grafton, S. (2000). Forward modeling allows feedback control for fast reaching movements. Trends in Cognitive Science, 1, 423–431.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Djikerman, H.C., & de Haan, E.H.F. (2007). Somatosensory processes subserving perception and action. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 3, 189–239.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fiorio, M., Tinazzi, M., & Aglioti, S.M. (2006). Selective impairment of hand mental rotation in patients with focal hand dystonia. Brain, 129, 47–54.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Fiorio, M., Tinazzi, M., Ionta, S., Fiaschi, A., Moretto, G., Edwards, M.J., et al. . (2007). Mental rotation of body parts and non-corporeal objects in patients with idiopathic cervical dystonia. Neuropsychologia, 45, 2346–2354.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Fitts, P.M. (1954). The information capacity of the human motor system in controlling the amplitude of movement. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 47, 381–391.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gallagher, S. (1995). Body schema and intentionality. In Bermudez, J.L., Marcel, A., & Eilan, N. (Eds), The body and the self. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Given, B., Given, C.W., Sikorskii, A., Jeon, S., McCorkle, R., Champion, V., & Decker, D. (2008). Establishing mild, moderate, and severe scores for cancer-related symptoms: How consistent and clinically meaningful are interference-based severity cut-points? Journal of Pain Symptom Management, 35, 126–135.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gracely, R.H. (1999). Pain measurement. Acta Anaesthesiologica Scandinavica, 43, 897–908.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Grafton, S.T., Arbib, M.A., Fadiga, L., & Rizzolatti, G. (1996). 1. Localization of grasp representations in humans by positron emission tomography. 2. Observation compared with imagination. Experimental Brain Research, 112, 201–207.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Grezes, J., & Decety, J. (2001). Functional anatomy of execution, mental simulation, observation, and verb generation of actions: A meta-analysis. Human Brain Mapping, 12, 1–19.3.0.CO;2-V>CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gustin, S.M., Wrigley, P.J., Ganevia, S.C., Middleton, J.W., Henderson, L.A., & Siddal, P.J. (2008). Movement imagery increases pain in people with neuropathic pain following complete thoracic spinal cord injury. Pain, 137, 237–244.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hudson, M.L., McCormick, K., Zalucki, N., & Moseley, G.L. (2006). Expectation of pain replicates the effect of pain in a hand laterality task: Bias in information processing toward the painful side? European Journal of Pain, 10, 219–224.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jeannerod, M. (1995). Mental imagery in the motor context. Neuropsychologia, 33, 1419–1432.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Jeon, S., Given, C.W., Sikorskii, A., & Given, B. (2009). Do interference-based cut-points differentiate mild, moderate, and severe levels of 16 cancer-related symptoms over time? Journal of Pain Symptom Management, 37, 220–232.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
MacLachlan, M., McDonald, D., & Waloch, J. (2004). Mirror treatment of lower limb phantom pain: A case study. Disability and Rehabilitation, 26, 901–904.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Maruff, P., & Velakoulis, D. (2000). The voluntary control of motor imagery. Imagined movements in individuals with feigned motor impairment and conversion disorder. Neuropsychologia, 38, 1251–1260.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Moseley, G.L. (2004a). Why do people with Complex Regional Pain Syndrome take longer to recognize their affected hand? Neurology, 62, 2182–2186.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Moseley, G.L. (2004b). Graded motor imagery is effective for long-standing Complex Regional Pain Syndrome. Pain, 108, 192–198.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Moseley, G.L., Parsons, T.J., & Spence, C. (2008). Visual distortion of a limb modulates the pain and swelling evoked by movement. Current Biology, 18, R1047–1048.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Moseley, G.L., & Wiech, K. (2009). The effect of tactile discrimination training is enhanced when patients watch the reflected image of their unaffected limb during training. Pain, 144, 314–319.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Parsons, L.M. (1987a). Imagined spatial transformations of one’s hands and feet. Cognitive Psychology, 19, 178–241.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Parsons, L.M. (1987b). Imagined spatial transformation of one’s body. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 116, 172–191.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Parsons, L.M. (1994). Temporal and kinematic properties of motor behavior reflected in mentally simulated action. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Perceptual Performance, 20, 709–730.Google ScholarPubMed
Ramachandran, V.S., & Rogers-Ramachandran, D. (1996). Synaesthesia in phantom limbs induced with mirrors. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 263, 377–386.Google ScholarPubMed
Schwoebel, J., Coronat, C.B., & Coslett, H.B. (2002a). The man who executed “imagined” movements: Evidence for dissociable components of the body schema. Brain Cognition, 50, 1–16.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Schwoebel, J., & Coslett, H.B. (2005). Evidence for multiple, distinct representations of the human body. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 17, 543–553.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Schwoebel, J., Coslett, H.B., Bradt, J., Friedman, R., & Dileo, C. (2002b). Pain and the body schema: Effects of pain severity on mental representations of movement. Neurology, 59, 775–777.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Schwoebel, J., Friedman, R., Duda, N., & Coslett, H.B. (2001). Pain and the body schema: Evidence for peripheral effects on mental representations of movement. Brain, 124, 2098–2104.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Shenton, J.T., Schwoebel, J., & Coslett, H.B. (2004). Mental motor imagery and the body schema: Evidence for proprioceptive dominance. Neuroscience Letters, 370, 19–24.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Sirigu, A., Cohen, L., Duhamel, J.R., Pillon, B., Bubois, B., Agid, Y., & Pierrot-Deseilligny, C. (1995). Congruent unilateral impairments for real and imagined hand movements. Neuroreport, 6, 997–1001.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Sirigu, A., Grafman, J., Bressler, K., & Sunderland, T. (1991). Multiple representations contribute to body knowledge processing. Evidence from a case of autotopagnosia. Brain, 114, 629–642.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Valeriani, M., Betti, V., Le Pera, D., De Armas, L., Miliucci, R., Restuccia, D., et al. (2008). Seeing the pain of others while being in pain: A laser-evoked potentials study. Neuroimage, 40, 1419–1428.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zelman, D.C., Dukes, E., Brandenburg, N., Bostrom, A., & Gore, M. (2005). Identification of cut-points for mild, moderate and severe pain due to diabetic peripheral neuropathy. Pain, 225, 29–36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar