Comparison between genders in imagery ability in Portuguese basketball practitioners.

IntroductionNowadays sport professionals have been researching the development and implementation of strategies and techniques that improve motor skills performance. The aim is to improve and optimize sport specific movements and eventually, athlete's performance. In this context, imagery, can be used as an additional method to improve the process of teaching, learning and performance of motor skills. McAvinue and Robertson (2008) produced a revision about the measures of motor imagery ability and concluded that due to individual differences of the subjects' imagery ability, it became essential to measure the individual capacity of each subject, before undertaking a study that involved motor imagery. On the sports environment, imagery, can be considered as a creation or replication of an experience that was generated through information stored in one's memory. This experience can involve sensitive, perceptive and affective characteristics that can happen even in the absence of real stimuli. Usually this causes physiological and psychological effects on the subject that does the imagery (Morris, Spittle, and Watt, 2005). Holmes and Calmels (2008, p.433) presented a concept of imagery adapted from Morris et al. (2005): "Imagery in the context of sport, may be considered as the neural generation or regeneration of parts of a brain representation/neural network involving primarily top-down sensorial, perceptual and affective characteristics, that are primarily under the conscious control of the imager and which may occur in the absence of perceptual afference functionally equivalent to the actual sporting experience". According to several studies it was verified benefits of imagery capacity in the performance and learning of athletes (Callow and Roberts, 2010; Doussolin and Rehbein, 2011; Anwar et al, 2011; Gaggioli et al., 2013; Williams and Cumming, 2012). For William et al. (2012) determining which modality of imagery (kinesthetic, internal or external visual) is the most appropriate to each subject it is vital, as it leads to best results in the application of the imagery technique. Relative to the type of imagery, athletes fundamentally described four (visual, kinesthetic, auditive and olfactory), and that the visual and kinesthetic are the most used and in more diverse situations (Weinberg & Gould, 2011). When the objective is simulating an action or a movement, the focus is normally kinesthetic and visual. Visual representation contains information about what the individual "sees" in these images and can be done from two perspectives: the internal perspective, in which it is seen in the first person, known as internal visual imagery, making the individual part of the action, or rather, imagining he sees with his own eyes; the external perspective, in which one sees oneself in the third person, known as external visual imagery, in which the individual occupies the position of an observer as if seeing the action outsider of his own body (Holmes & Calmels, 2008). Kinesthetic modality of movement involves the representation of how it "feels" to perform an action, such as the tension of a muscle contracting when climbing stairs. This internal feeling involves awareness of position and of body movements, also known as proprioception or kinesthesia, as well as the strength and effort experienced during the movements (Callow & Watters, 2005; Kim et al., 1998). White and Hardy (1995) state that each of the visual modality perspectives serve different purposes: the perspective of visual external imagery has greater value in the performance of tasks such movement learning, and when the corporal shape or coordination is important, in other words, visualizing how the movement or action should be performed; the perspective of internal visual imagery has greater value in open abilities in which the temporal notion is important (the individual is able to visualize spatial notion and when the movement should be started). …