Recent studies suggest that a night of sleep may play a similar functional role following motor imagery (MI) practice. Here we examined whether offline gains following MI of a finger tapping sequence depends on the degree of complexity of the motor sequence, and whether this improvement differentially affects the individual transitions of the motor-sequence pattern being learned. The data revealed greater delayed performance gains in motor skill procedures that were most difficult, with larger sleep-dependent overnight improvement for movements involving bimanual coordination. The analyses of single transitions between sequence elements further revealed greatest overnight improvement in speed for the slowest (i.e., most difficult) transitions at the re-test. These findings suggest that sleep-related performance gains for imagined movements depend on motor skill complexity, and that difficult transition movements are most effectively enhanced after a night of sleep.

中文翻译：

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复杂运动的运动成像后的选择性延迟增益。

最近的研究表明，在运动影像（MI）练习后，整夜的睡眠可能起类似的功能作用。在这里，我们检查了手指敲击序列的MI之后的脱机增益是否取决于电机序列的复杂程度，以及这种改进是否有差异地影响所学习的电机序列模式的各个过渡。数据显示，在最困难的运动技能程序中，延迟表现的提升更大，涉及双手协调的动作的依赖睡眠的过夜改善更大。序列元素之间单个跃迁的分析进一步揭示了在重新测试中，对于最慢（即最困难）的跃迁，速度在一夜之间有了最大的改善。