The effect of mental practice on performance in a sequential reaction time task

The effect of mental practice on performance in a dot-location RT task was investigated. Participants (N = 40) were required either to mentally practice, physically practice, or do no practice on an RT task in which the signals appeared in a repeating sequence. Correct mental practice, as opposed to incorrect mental practice and no practice, was predicted to have a positive (enhancing) effect on performance of the RT task. Despite previous evidence that mental rehearsal does enhance performance in many perceptual-motor tasks, neither correct nor incorrect mental rehearsal affected subsequent sequence learning; that is, no mental practice effect was observed. That surprising result is discussed in terms of motivational, psychoneuromuscular, separate memory systems, and transfer-appropriate processing explanations of mental practice.