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Human Brain Function in Path Planning: a Task Study

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Abstract

Despite plenty of research being performed in the human movement science, less attention has been paid to the probable method used by the human brain in the higher-level motor planning. The previous studies suggest that the human brain may use a predictive approach to anticipate physical dynamics of the body and the environment to plan a short and collision-free movement trajectory. We propose that the human brain may use a model-based prediction procedure in path planning in which a finite prediction horizon is used to estimate the future state of the body and the environment. A goal-oriented driving task (GDT) in a virtual street was designed to consider the human path planning method in dynamic environments. Two groups of experiments were presented to consider the ability of the human brain in estimation of a dynamic object location and planning a collision-free path. The first group of study includes four GDTs, with different conditions to evaluate how the human planning strategy would change by varying the configuration of the environment. In the second group, the changes of human planning in a visually obscured and blurred situation were considered. The results are in compliance with the theory of using a model-based prediction approach by human brains and indicate that the subjects benefit from a prediction horizon to plan their paths. Our studies provide evidence to introduce possible factors which may be used by the human brain during path planning in dynamic environments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA

    Yeganeh M. Marghi

  2. Biological System Modeling Laboratory, Department of Biomedical Engineering, Amirkabir University of Technology (Tehran Polytechnic), 424 Hafez Ave., Tehran, 15875-4413, Iran

    Yeganeh M. Marghi & Farzad Towhidkhah

  3. Neuromuscular Systems Laboratory, Department of Biomedical Engineering, Amirkabir University of Technology (Tehran Polytechnic), Tehran, Iran

    Shahriar Gharibzadeh

Authors
  1. Yeganeh M. Marghi
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  2. Farzad Towhidkhah
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  3. Shahriar Gharibzadeh
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Correspondence to Farzad Towhidkhah.

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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Ethical Approval

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were investigated and approved by the ethical committee of the Office of Education of the Amirkabir University of Technology (# M11714).

Informed Consent

Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

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Marghi, Y.M., Towhidkhah, F. & Gharibzadeh, S. Human Brain Function in Path Planning: a Task Study. Cogn Comput 9, 136–149 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12559-016-9443-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12559-016-9443-3

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