Mental Practice and Motor Learning of a Functional Motor Task in Older Adults: A Pilot Study

The purpose of this study was to examine the influence of mental practice on retention of a newly learned functional motor task in older adults. Nineteen non-demented community-dwelling older adults were randomly assigned to experimental and control groups and received a session of individual instruction in a novel motor task. Subjects were scored on their performance of the motor task on the final practice trial of the training session, and again 48-72 hours later. The experimental group mentally rehearsed the procedure 4 times in the 48 hour interval between training and testing while control subjects did not. Subjects in the experimental group scored significantly higher on the test day than the control subjects (p < 1.0), and difference scores from training to testing dates were significantly different between groups (p < 0.50). These findings suggest that for older adults, mental practice facilitates retention of a newly learned functional motor task. (C) 2006 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.