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Performance of Young Children on ‘‘Traveling Salesperson’’ Navigation Tasks Presented on a Touch Screen

BACKGROUND: The traveling salesperson problem (TSP) refers to a task in which one finds the shortest path when traveling through multiple spatially distributed points. Little is known about the developmental course of the strategies used to solve TSPs. The present study examined young children'...

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Autores principales: Miyata, Hiromitsu, Watanabe, Shigeru, Minagawa, Yasuyo
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2014
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4270727/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25521714
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0115292
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author Miyata, Hiromitsu
Watanabe, Shigeru
Minagawa, Yasuyo
author_facet Miyata, Hiromitsu
Watanabe, Shigeru
Minagawa, Yasuyo
author_sort Miyata, Hiromitsu
collection PubMed
description BACKGROUND: The traveling salesperson problem (TSP) refers to a task in which one finds the shortest path when traveling through multiple spatially distributed points. Little is known about the developmental course of the strategies used to solve TSPs. The present study examined young children's performance and route selection strategies in one-way TSPs using a city-block metric. A touch screen-based navigation task was applied. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Children (39–70 months) and adults (21–35 years) made serial responses on a touch screen to move a picture of a dog (the target) to two or three identical pictures of a bone (the goals). For all the versions of the tasks, significant improvement in measures of performance was observed from younger to older participants. In TSPs in which a specific route selection strategy such as the nearest-neighbor strategy minimized the total traveling distance, older participants used that strategy more frequently than younger ones. By contrast, in TSPs in which multiple strategies equally led to the minimal traveling distance, children tended to use strategies different from those used by adults, such as traveling straight to the farthest goal first. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: The results primarily suggest development of efficient route selection strategies that can optimize total numbers of movements and/or solution time. Unlike adults, children sometimes prioritized other strategies such as traveling straight ahead until being forced to change directions. This may reflect the fact that children were either less attentive to the task or less efficient at perceiving the overall shape of the problem and/or the relative distance from the starting location to each goal.
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spelling pubmed-42707272014-12-26 Performance of Young Children on ‘‘Traveling Salesperson’’ Navigation Tasks Presented on a Touch Screen Miyata, Hiromitsu Watanabe, Shigeru Minagawa, Yasuyo PLoS One Research Article BACKGROUND: The traveling salesperson problem (TSP) refers to a task in which one finds the shortest path when traveling through multiple spatially distributed points. Little is known about the developmental course of the strategies used to solve TSPs. The present study examined young children's performance and route selection strategies in one-way TSPs using a city-block metric. A touch screen-based navigation task was applied. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Children (39–70 months) and adults (21–35 years) made serial responses on a touch screen to move a picture of a dog (the target) to two or three identical pictures of a bone (the goals). For all the versions of the tasks, significant improvement in measures of performance was observed from younger to older participants. In TSPs in which a specific route selection strategy such as the nearest-neighbor strategy minimized the total traveling distance, older participants used that strategy more frequently than younger ones. By contrast, in TSPs in which multiple strategies equally led to the minimal traveling distance, children tended to use strategies different from those used by adults, such as traveling straight to the farthest goal first. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: The results primarily suggest development of efficient route selection strategies that can optimize total numbers of movements and/or solution time. Unlike adults, children sometimes prioritized other strategies such as traveling straight ahead until being forced to change directions. This may reflect the fact that children were either less attentive to the task or less efficient at perceiving the overall shape of the problem and/or the relative distance from the starting location to each goal. Public Library of Science 2014-12-18 /pmc/articles/PMC4270727/ /pubmed/25521714 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0115292 Text en © 2014 Miyata et al http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Miyata, Hiromitsu
Watanabe, Shigeru
Minagawa, Yasuyo
Performance of Young Children on ‘‘Traveling Salesperson’’ Navigation Tasks Presented on a Touch Screen
title Performance of Young Children on ‘‘Traveling Salesperson’’ Navigation Tasks Presented on a Touch Screen
title_full Performance of Young Children on ‘‘Traveling Salesperson’’ Navigation Tasks Presented on a Touch Screen
title_fullStr Performance of Young Children on ‘‘Traveling Salesperson’’ Navigation Tasks Presented on a Touch Screen
title_full_unstemmed Performance of Young Children on ‘‘Traveling Salesperson’’ Navigation Tasks Presented on a Touch Screen
title_short Performance of Young Children on ‘‘Traveling Salesperson’’ Navigation Tasks Presented on a Touch Screen
title_sort performance of young children on ‘‘traveling salesperson’’ navigation tasks presented on a touch screen
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4270727/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25521714
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0115292
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