Spatial working memory is crucial for orientation and movement in the environment, but its precise neurocognitive mechanisms are still not fully understood. In this Master's thesis, we examined the behavioural reflection of different mechanisms of encoding and maintaining spatial information in working memory. The study included 38 healthy participants (31 female, M age = 20 years, SD age = 1 year) , who performed a spatial working memory task. The task tested participants' ability to maintain the position of a visual stimulus for a short period of time, and different modes of information encoding were stimulated in separate task conditions: egocentric, allocentric, motor and sensory. When analysing behavioural performance, we first compared the motor and sensory conditions: participants were statistically significantly more accurate in the motor condition compared to the sensory condition, which was most pronounced in the smaller angular error and the lower mean Euclidean distance, while differences in the estimation of position amplitude were not statistically significant. We then compared the allocentric and egocentric conditions and found that participants in the allocentric condition achieved statistically significantly lower mean Euclidean distance and angular error compared to the egocentric condition, while the differences in amplitude error were not statistically significant. Subjective reported strategies revealed that visual strategies are most commonly used by participants in all task conditions, while motor-motor or spatial-connection strategies remain relatively unnoticed. We hypothesise that the pattern of behavioural performance reflect the different cognitive demands of individual encoding and maintenance mechanisms, contributing to a better understanding of the underlying neurocognitive processes of spatial working memory.
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