A Computational Model of Human Planning in the Traveling Salesman Problem
Demis Basso, Patrizia Silvia Bisiacchi, Simone Cutini, Andrea Di Ferdinando, Marco Zorzi · eScholarship (California Digital Library) · 2005
Planning is a fundamental cognitive function frequently employed in usual daily activitities.The Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP), in which the participant decides what order between a number of locations optimizes total travel distance, is a paradigm that allows the study of planning and strategy choice.We present a computational model that simulates the human performance observed during the execution of a variant of the TSP task, including bottom-up and top-down influences.The performance of the model simulated the continuous monitoring observed in human participants; moreover, after a lesion to the network's units corresponding to the prefrontal cortex, we found a decrease of strategy changes like those observed in frontal patients.