Movement Imagery in Rock Climbing: Patterns of Interference from Visual, Spatial and Kinaesthetic Secondary Tasks

The movements of our bodies are spatial as well as motor. They have structure and shape and they carry e€ectors to locations in space. In planning and rehearsing movements we can choose to plan the con®guration over a limb or over the body as a whole, or we can plan to move a limb to a speci®c target. So, it is possible to perform (or imagine performing) an arabesque, or to kick a stationary football and in one case to be concerned with posture, con®guration and stability and in the other to be concerned with location, force and time. Because of the spatial and perceptual context for action, imagery for movement is conceptually complex. One can imagine what a movement looks like from the inside and from the outside, and one can feel the movement, hear its consequences, rehearse its structure, perceive the e€ort exerted, or plan a sequence, and many of these aspects of an imagined action will themselves focus on spatial characteristics of the action.