Visuospatial planning in the travelling salesperson problem: A connectionist account of normal and impaired performance

Planning is a fundamental cognitive function frequently employed in common daily activities. The Travelling Salesperson Problem (TSP), in which participants decide what order between a number of locations optimizes total travel distance, is a paradigm that allows the study of planning and strategy c...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Cognitive neuropsychology 2008-03, Vol.25 (2), p.194-217
Main Authors: Cutini, Simone, Di Ferdinando, Andrea, Basso, Demis, Silvia Bisiacchi, Patrizia, Zorzi, Marco
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Attention - physiology
Brain - physiopathology
Cognition Disorders - physiopathology
Cognition Disorders - psychology
Decision Making - physiology
Distance Perception - physiology
Frontal Lobe - physiopathology
Humans
Neural Networks (Computer)
Neural Pathways - physiopathology
Neuropsychological Tests
Orientation - physiology
Problem Solving - physiology
Reference Values
Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation
Visual Perception - physiology
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Summary:Planning is a fundamental cognitive function frequently employed in common daily activities. The Travelling Salesperson Problem (TSP), in which participants decide what order between a number of locations optimizes total travel distance, is a paradigm that allows the study of planning and strategy choice. In the TSP, subjects adopt visuo-spatial heuristics to perform the task and operate a continuous monitoring to adapt their behaviour. We present a connectionist model of the TSP that simulates bottom-up and top-down influences observed in the execution of the task. The model accounts for the continuous monitoring observed in healthy participants, and, after a simulated lesion, it also accounts for the decrease of heuristic switching observed in frontal patients and in normal subjects under repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) over frontal lobe.
ISSN:0264-3294
1464-0627
DOI:10.1080/02643290701606408