I'm not sure about the basketball experiment, but there are other visualization experiments described in the book Your Body Has a Mind of Its Own by Sandra Blakeslee and Matthew Blakeslee.
One experiment talks about darts done by William Straub at Ithica College. He divided 75 students into 5 groups: Control (no practice or visualization), practice only, and three different groups doing mental training programs plus practice. After two months, the control group average scores were unchanged, the practice only group went up an average of 67 points, and the three visualization + practice groups went up 111, 141, and 165.
Alvaro Pascual-Leone at Harvard Medical University did an experiment with visualization only using a simple piano playing exercise to measure improvement. He found that visualization alone worked about the same as practice alone.
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