 Not only motor imagery, but mental imagery also plays an important role in action execution (see Van Leeuwen 2011). Some of our actions (in fact, most of them) are perceptually guided actions: our perceptual states trigger and guide our action. When we pick up a coffee cup to drink from it, this is a perceptually guided action: our perceptual state represents the spatial location of the cup, which then guides your reaching movement (and does so in real time, if the perceptual state changes, your reaching movement changes immediately without you noticing any of these changes, see e.g., Paulignan et al. 1991).