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Brain Activity Associated with the Planning Process during the Long-Time Learning of the Tower of Hanoi (ToH) Task: A Pilot Study

Planning and decision-making are critical managerial functions involving the brain’s executive functions. However, little is known about the effect of cerebral activity during long-time learning while planning and decision-making. This study investigated the impact of planning and decision-making pr...

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Autores principales: Mitani, Keita, Rathnayake, Namal, Rathnayake, Upaka, Dang, Tuan Linh, Hoshino, Yukinobu
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9654550/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36365987
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/s22218283
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author Mitani, Keita
Rathnayake, Namal
Rathnayake, Upaka
Dang, Tuan Linh
Hoshino, Yukinobu
author_facet Mitani, Keita
Rathnayake, Namal
Rathnayake, Upaka
Dang, Tuan Linh
Hoshino, Yukinobu
author_sort Mitani, Keita
collection PubMed
description Planning and decision-making are critical managerial functions involving the brain’s executive functions. However, little is known about the effect of cerebral activity during long-time learning while planning and decision-making. This study investigated the impact of planning and decision-making processes in long-time learning, focusing on a cerebral activity before and after learning. The methodology of this study involves the Tower of Hanoi (ToH) to investigate executive functions related to the learning process. Generally, ToH is used to measure baseline performance, learning rate, offline learning (following overnight retention), and transfer. However, this study performs experiments on long-time learning effects for ToH solving. The participants were involved in learning the task over seven weeks. Learning progress was evaluated based on improvement in performance and correlations with the learning curve. All participants showed a significant improvement in planning and decision-making over seven weeks of time duration. Brain activation results from fMRI showed a statistically significant decrease in the activation degree in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, parietal lobe, inferior frontal gyrus, and premotor cortex between before and after learning. Our pilot study showed that updating information and shifting issue rules were found in the frontal lobe. Through monitoring performance, we can describe the effect of long-time learning initiated at the frontal lobe and then convert it to a task execution function by analyzing the frontal lobe maps. This process can be observed by comparing the learning curve and the fMRI maps. It was also clear that the degree of activation tends to decrease with the number of tasks, such as through the mid-phase and the end-phase of training. The elucidation of this structure is closely related to decision-making in human behavior, where brain dynamics differ between “thinking and behavior” during complex thinking in the early stages of training and instantaneous “thinking and behavior” after sufficient training. Since this is related to human learning, elucidating these mechanisms will allow the construction of a brain function map model that can be used universally for all training tasks.
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spelling pubmed-96545502022-11-15 Brain Activity Associated with the Planning Process during the Long-Time Learning of the Tower of Hanoi (ToH) Task: A Pilot Study Mitani, Keita Rathnayake, Namal Rathnayake, Upaka Dang, Tuan Linh Hoshino, Yukinobu Sensors (Basel) Article Planning and decision-making are critical managerial functions involving the brain’s executive functions. However, little is known about the effect of cerebral activity during long-time learning while planning and decision-making. This study investigated the impact of planning and decision-making processes in long-time learning, focusing on a cerebral activity before and after learning. The methodology of this study involves the Tower of Hanoi (ToH) to investigate executive functions related to the learning process. Generally, ToH is used to measure baseline performance, learning rate, offline learning (following overnight retention), and transfer. However, this study performs experiments on long-time learning effects for ToH solving. The participants were involved in learning the task over seven weeks. Learning progress was evaluated based on improvement in performance and correlations with the learning curve. All participants showed a significant improvement in planning and decision-making over seven weeks of time duration. Brain activation results from fMRI showed a statistically significant decrease in the activation degree in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, parietal lobe, inferior frontal gyrus, and premotor cortex between before and after learning. Our pilot study showed that updating information and shifting issue rules were found in the frontal lobe. Through monitoring performance, we can describe the effect of long-time learning initiated at the frontal lobe and then convert it to a task execution function by analyzing the frontal lobe maps. This process can be observed by comparing the learning curve and the fMRI maps. It was also clear that the degree of activation tends to decrease with the number of tasks, such as through the mid-phase and the end-phase of training. The elucidation of this structure is closely related to decision-making in human behavior, where brain dynamics differ between “thinking and behavior” during complex thinking in the early stages of training and instantaneous “thinking and behavior” after sufficient training. Since this is related to human learning, elucidating these mechanisms will allow the construction of a brain function map model that can be used universally for all training tasks. MDPI 2022-10-28 /pmc/articles/PMC9654550/ /pubmed/36365987 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/s22218283 Text en © 2022 by the authors. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Article
Mitani, Keita
Rathnayake, Namal
Rathnayake, Upaka
Dang, Tuan Linh
Hoshino, Yukinobu
Brain Activity Associated with the Planning Process during the Long-Time Learning of the Tower of Hanoi (ToH) Task: A Pilot Study
title Brain Activity Associated with the Planning Process during the Long-Time Learning of the Tower of Hanoi (ToH) Task: A Pilot Study
title_full Brain Activity Associated with the Planning Process during the Long-Time Learning of the Tower of Hanoi (ToH) Task: A Pilot Study
title_fullStr Brain Activity Associated with the Planning Process during the Long-Time Learning of the Tower of Hanoi (ToH) Task: A Pilot Study
title_full_unstemmed Brain Activity Associated with the Planning Process during the Long-Time Learning of the Tower of Hanoi (ToH) Task: A Pilot Study
title_short Brain Activity Associated with the Planning Process during the Long-Time Learning of the Tower of Hanoi (ToH) Task: A Pilot Study
title_sort brain activity associated with the planning process during the long-time learning of the tower of hanoi (toh) task: a pilot study
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9654550/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36365987
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/s22218283
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