Dual-task paradigms consistently reveal stabilizing effects of mental rotation tasks on postural stability in healthy young adults. Other studies suggest that mental rotation ability might be a predictor of postural stability. However, the question of how the relationship between mental rotation and postural stability can be explained remains open. A potential explanation may be the visuospatial sketchpad of working memory and its sub-components, spatial working memory (SWM) and object working memory (OWM). Studies show interference between mental rotation and SWM and between mental rotation and OWM. In contrast, only the link between SWM and postural stability is known.
This study aims to provide an overview of how mental rotation, postural stability and the two components of visual-spatial working memory, SWM and OWM, are related in healthy young adults. Based on a G*Power analysis, we aim to collect data from 89 participants. Each participant will perform three cognitive tasks (Mental Rotation Task, Corsi Block Task and Chinese Character Recognition) and a postural stability task (single leg stance on an AMTI-OR6-7-2000 force plate) in randomized order. We hypothesize that mental rotation ability and postural stability will correlate positively. SWM should correlate positively with mental rotation ability and postural stability whereas OWM should only correlate positively with mental rotation ability. Exploratively, it will be investigated if SWM is the best predictor of postural stability among mental rotation ability, SWM and OWM. Data collection is ongoing and the results will be finalized before the conference. The study is preregistered on osf.io.