Abstract
Previous studies have reported that imagining a motor movement from the first-person perspective (1PP) is more embodied than the third-person perspective (3PP). The motor imagery in 1PP is restricted by biomechanical constraints of actual movements. The present study investigated whether biomechanical constraints influence the motor imagery in 3PP using a hand-laterality judgment task. In the task, drawings of hands were presented on a monitor in three different orientations (0°, 90°, or 270°), and the participant was asked to judge whether a presented hand was his/her left or right hand (1PP group) or another person’s left or right hand (3PP group). In the 1PP group, participants showed different RTs in the 90° and the 270° for the left and the right hand, but not in the 3PP group. The result suggests that biomechanical constraints emerge in 1PP, but it is not clear in 3PP due to the difficulty of taking 3PP.
