ИСТИНА

Currently in psychological rehabilitation the necessity of developing innovative methods for testing cognitive disorders is becoming increasingly important. One of the urgent requests is associated with developing a new therapeutic tool for spatial cognition disorders, which, in particular, are manifested in decreasing the accuracy of mental spatial representations (SR) of the environment. In the scientific literature two types of spatial representations are highlighted: egocentric representations (ESR), encoding object locations relative to the observer and allocentric representations (ASR), specifying the relative positions between objects. There is very little data on the accuracy of ESR and ASR processing in working memory. To study this issue, the method was developed testing the ability to memorize 3D complex scenes. Six unique virtual scenes were constructed each consisted of seven objects located in different 3D positions. Each scene was shown for 25 seconds using the CAVE virtual reality system. Thirty six participants (22F, 14M, age range 18—26) were tested. The participant’s task was to remember the scene and then to reproduce it in a virtual space using the given viewpoint: «the front» viewpoint (to reproduce the memorized scene from the egocentric position), «the left» and «the above» viewpoints (to reproduce the scene from the left or above imaginary allocentric positions, respectively). To perform the task, the participants chose objects from the library of virtual objects and placed them in virtual space using the flystick. The object locations in virtual space were recorded. Then, the accuracy of ESR and ASR cording in terms of metric, topology and depth parameters was calculated. The results showed that the ESR cording ("the front" viewpoint) was more accurate in comparison with the ASR cording ("the left" and "the above" viewpoints). The comparison of two allocentric representations revealed greater accuracy of restoring the scene from “the above” viewpoint. The topological accuracy was much better than the metric and depth accuracy regardless of the viewpoints. The developed method revealed the features of ESR and ASR coding. It may be required in clinical psychological rehabilitation of spatial cognition disorders. The study was supported by RFBR grant, project № 17-29-02169