Assessing Motor Imagery Vividness in Children Using a Visual Analog Scale: Convergent Validity and Responsiveness

Assessing motor imagery (MI) vividness for specific tasks is essential for effective MI training; however, no task-specific method is available for children. This study examined the usefulness of the Visual Analog Scale (VAS) for assessing MI vividness in children. Thirty-three right-handed typically developing children participated in two sessions meant to assess VAS convergent validity and responsiveness. To assess convergent validity, a shirt-donning task was assigned, and Pearson's correlation was used to test the relationship between mental chronometry and VAS scores during imagined performance. For responsiveness, pre- and post-training changes in VAS scores during the ball rotation task (BRT) were examined using paired t-tests. A significant correlation was found between mental chronometry and VAS scores for shirt donning (r = -.518, p = .002). Post-training, BRT performance improved, and VAS scores increased significantly (p < .001). These findings provide preliminary evidence of the potential usefulness of the VAS for assessing task-specific MI vividness in children.