Griesbauer, E.-M., Fernandez Velasco, P., Coutrot, A. et al. (5 more authors) (2025) London taxi drivers exploit neighbourhood boundaries for hierarchical route planning. Cognition, 256. 106014. ISSN 0010-0277
Abstract
Humans show an impressive ability to plan over complex situations and environments. A classic approach to explaining such planning has been tree-search algorithms which search through alternative state sequences for the most efficient path through states. However, this approach fails when the number of states is large due to the time to compute all possible sequences. Hierarchical route planning has been proposed as an alternative, offering a computationally efficient mechanism in which the representation of the environment is segregated into clusters. Current evidence for hierarchical planning comes from experimentally created environments which have clearly defined boundaries and far fewer states than the real-world. To test for real-world hierarchical planning we exploited the capacity of London licensed taxi drivers to use their memory to construct a street by street plan across London, UK (>26,000 streets). The time to recall each successive street name was treated as the response time, with a rapid average of 1.8 s between each street. In support of hierarchical planning we find that the clustered structure of London's regions impacts the response times, with minimal impact of the distance across the street network (as would be predicted by tree-search). We also find that changing direction during the plan (e.g. turning left or right) is associated with delayed response times. Thus, our results provide real-world evidence for how humans structure planning over a very large number of states, and give a measure of human expertise in planning.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2024 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) |
Keywords: | Spatial representation; Real-world evidence; Hierarchical representations; Spatial cognition; Wayfinding; Executive function |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Environment (Leeds) > School of Geography (Leeds) > Centre for Spatial Analysis & Policy (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 07 Jan 2025 17:26 |
Last Modified: | 07 Jan 2025 17:26 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Elsevier |
Identification Number: | 10.1016/j.cognition.2024.106014 |
Related URLs: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:221416 |