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 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.
University of Padova, Padua, Italy.
Simone
S
Cutini
Andrea
A
Di Ferdinando
Demis
D
Basso
Patrizia
P
Silvia Bisiacchi
Marco
M
Zorzi
D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D001921:Brain / Q000503:physiopathology*; D003072:Cognition Disorders / Q000503:physiopathology* / Q000523:psychology; D003657:Decision Making / Q000502:physiology; D004215:Distance Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D005625:Frontal Lobe / Q000503:physiopathology*; D006801:Humans; D016571:Neural Networks, Computer; D009434:Neural Pathways / Q000503:physiopathology; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D009949:Orientation / Q000502:physiology*; D011340:Problem Solving / Q000502:physiology*; D012016:Reference Values; D050781:Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology*