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.
Cutini
Simone
S
University of Padova, Padua, Italy.
Di Ferdinando
Andrea
A
Basso
Demis
D
Silvia Bisiacchi
Patrizia
P
Zorzi
Marco
M
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*