Sensation of effort and duration of mentally executed actions

The aim of this study was to examine whether a sensation of effort would arise in subjects requested, by verbal instructions, to mentally perform motor tasks with an internal imagery strategy. Sixteen subjects had to imagine themselves, from a first person perspective, writing a sentence and drawing a Necker's cube either with their right dominant hand or with their left hand, as well as hopping around a square either on their right or left foot. The time needed to mentally execute these actions was measured. The sensation of effort following the mental performance and the difficulty of imaging the tasks were assessed by means of two analog rating scales. The results indicate that the sensation of effort increased across the trials. Furthermore, a negative correlation coefficient (mean r = -0.99) was found between the difficulty to imagining a given motor task and the subjective sensation of effort across the trials. Moreover, the sensation of effort was more pronounced when the tasks involved the non-dominant limb.